Weekly Status Report, W03/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2010 (January 18 - 24, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  A lot of more work on L10n nightly updates until I finally got then to work. Note that any SeaMonkey nightly updates are complete updates only, as the tooling to do partials for nightlies on our normal build machine pools is not done yet, currently waiting on Mozilla RelEng there. Getting our nightly updates to work correctly needed changes across 3-4 repositories (including mozilla-central and comm-central), but everyone was cooperative and it ended up great.
  The next step I had on my mind was switching to packaged tests, both for being nearer to what Firefox run and making it possible to run test suite in parallel, esp. as mochitest-plain runs really long. To my surprise, this worked well, I needed only one small change to the generic test factory and it worked for SeaMonkey (I later coded up an improvement to report Mozilla revisions, but things worked fine without it) and tests did run fine except for a mailnews xpcshell problem, which I hope will be dealt with soon. With that, I could officially do the switch for the most part.
  I also did experimentally create some hourly builders to run on a 1.9.2 tree, which we don't really want to target for SeaMonkey, but want to at least build fine. I spotted a packaging problem that was a regression form a recent build system port and Serge swiftly fixed that one - thanks for that!
  And, as I now know how to deal with packaged tests and in the new architecture we should run them on normal debug and even optimized builds, I turned on the xpcshell test suite for SeaMonkey trunk Linux builds (the debug ones we do for leak testing), even if a number of failures show up there - it's the first step to fixing them. A one-cycle test run of the other suites pointed to some more issues to fix, but we don't have the machine power right now to run them all the time.
• Download Progress Windows:
  After some proposals have come up for fixing progress window shortcomings, we were looking for icons that were usable under our licenses, and when those failed to materialize, I went and created my own SVG icons to match the small ones we have right now, so I could produce larger versions. Having done that, I worked on patching the dialog and posted screen shots of this work in progress in the bug.
  Back when I did the version of those windows that is in 2.0 right now, I did the fastest solution I could while still applying a design facelift, now for 2.1 we should have the time to improve on that and correct problems we see with this 2.0 design.
  I also updated my patch for moving core build master code to a shared place.
• History Expiration:
  I'm risking the next flame war against me with this, but I did a patch to react to the places expiration rework done for the whole Mozilla platform, which also removes the ability to limit history to a fixed number of days or sites, but instead goes with a memory percentage. We will need to implement the cleaning up private data based on time frames to complement this to at least reduce the complaints, I think. While working on this, I saw that Thunderbird also has prefs for this around and filed a bug for them as well.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  As mentioned above, L10n nightly updates for SeaMonkey trunk work now, I posted to the L10n newsgroups about this as well.
• Various Discussions:
  Add-on compatibility communication, new machines, comm-central policy for requiring tests, nightly.m.o, possible platform roadmap options, Firebug 1.5 release, Firefox 3.6 release, external linkage for mailnews, KompoZer and SeaMonkey, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, community-based geolocation service, etc.

This has been a really productive week again and it feels good to get real things moving and also start to do work and planning for SeaMonkey 2.1 now, turning the head back and putting out fires on 2.0 was really getting tedious - even though we have a slightly conservative approach here in SeaMonkey land, we are as much about progress and innovation as the rest of the Mozilla project (even if it is in our way and sometimes means the some changes are not as much into-your-face and revolutionary as in other projects but have more of a continuity label on them).
I hope we all can get into this more again now and get some exciting patches landed for the next version of our great suite.