Weekly Status Report, W24/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 24/2010 (June 14 - 20, 2010):

• Releases:
  Once again, continued following Firefox release discussions to determine when we can ship 2.0.5 in sync with their builds. This might now come really close.
  In the SeaMonkey Meeting on Tuesday, we decided to freeze for Alpha 2 tomorrow and add a third alpha in July or early August.
• Build Infrastructure:
  I fixed Linux64 trunk builds by switching to gcc 4.5, which I had installed the week before anyhow.
  To fix some test failures related to painting, I installed VNC on all Windows slaves, so that a screen seems always to be attached and painting is done correctly. The success was a bit hard to verify at first, because our master got stuck, but Mozilla IT people reacted relatively fast to reboot it - thanks for that!
  On Linux slaves, I also installed ccache and put it into use on 64bit at the same time as the new compiler.
  And while I was at it, I did the upgrade to buildbot 0.8 on the Linux slaves, and that seems to have gone well for those. Thanks to Ben Hearsum for providing me with the packages in absence of a solution for direct access to puppet packages.
  On machine requests, I filed a bug for Mac64 and Win64 slaves so we can at least set up experimental builds. I also filed a bug intended as a tracker for the needed machines in the one year hardware strategy 2010 - it looks like Seth also welcomed it as a general envelope bug for that strategy.
• Data Manager:
  The currently available version on AMO is still 0.7, but it's now a public Add-on.
  In my local code, I have done quite some work to detect what specifically has changed when we observe a data change, and even implemented the UI reacting to such changes for cookies. The next step is now to do the same thing for the other data types - once that's finished, I'll be able to call the result a 1.0 version.
  Also, I asked the Firefox UX team for design help, with the outcome that I should probably ask more publicly about Firefox efforts in similar directions so we can potentially reduce overall overlap. I'm still not sure if they really want as much detail in their UI as Data Manager is presenting right now - but if so, I hope my work is a good base even for them.
• Places:
  Reacted to more review comments on places bookmarks, and during investigation of the locked database infobar, I realized that the "Know Your Rights" toolbar was not shown any more, which Neil fixed very fast. Thanks for that! I also realized we'll need an additional help topic that is called by that locked database infobar, and filed a followup bug for that.
  I also updated the patch for making site icons work with places, which I originally thought of as a followup, but may be useful by itself for history as well, so I'll drive it into the tree independently.
  While I'm waiting for more bookmarks review, please continue testing the current try builds.
• Themes, Plugins:
  I worked to get my themes updated for 2.1 Alpha 2 and during that realized that SeaMonkey is missing outdated plugin notifications, which would be a really good thing to add for the 2.1 series. Help on that is wanted!
• Various Discussions:
  XPCOM changes, gopher removal, perma-oranges, hardware acceleration and Linux, trunk-is-not-trunk model for Thunderbird, Mozilla security bug bounties, upcoming reporter removal/replacement, UA strings, FF Beta tester feedback tool, etc.

A lot of things are moving forward nicely: Our build machines and test results have improved a lot, but still need some more work - on the latter, you can help as well by figuring out causes of test failures and trying to come up with patches. Passing automated tests would and will make SeaMonkey 2.1 a better product!
That said, I think doing another alpha soon is a good step to that as well, even if the first alpha only had 3300 downloads so far and is at roughly 200 daily used installations now. Handing out somewhat tested milestone builds to people should improve testing of new code and has already doubled overall usage of 2.1-targeted builds up to this point. Further alphas should improve that even more. And the new 2.1 features gained some SeaMonkey-specific points as well recently, which is nice as well.
My own large projects are progressing, but not ready for inclusion yet - places bookmarks is going a bit slow on reviews, and Data Manager not really feature-complete at the moment, but both are moving in the right direction and I hope both will still make the 2.1 release.