Weekly Status Report, W31/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 31/2010 (August 2 - 8, 2010):

• Build Machines:
  I installed gcc 4.5.1 on the Linux build machines, this is being used on 64bit already and will be in the future on 32bit as well, but I'm waiting for the activation on Firefox there.
  On the Mac machines, I updated to buildbot 0.8, getting one step closer to switching the whole system over to this new version. While I was at it, I also did a lot of cleanup of the build tools on those Mac Minis.
• Tabbed Browsing:
  The tab bar appearance improvements could finally land, both the normal default theme as well as lightweight themes should look nicer there now.
  In the last weeks, since I landed my places icons work and looked more often at them, I noticed wrong tabs loading icons at times, after I was pointed to the same problem on IRC, I filed it and with some investigation even found the cause and a fix, which should still land for 2.1a3.
  Somewhat related, I filed a bug and patch for actually loading favicon.ico for bookmarks/history if the right pref is set, so that those people wanting the excessive search for icons on servers actually get a reward for the pain they cause webmasters.
• Doorhanger Notifications:
  There was yet another significant Firefox patch landing for those, I again updated the doorhanger notifications and add-on web installation notifications patches. Reviews are ongoing, but the focus of my efforts of getting reviews was on other things this week (see below).
• Data Manager:
  I did address a large part of the reviews on Data Manager and improved the code a lot, warranting, next to patch updates, an updated 1.0.1 version on AMO that now should perform much better for everyone and also fixes a number of bugs in 1.0, including the forget panel.
  Meanwhile, reviews are progressing in the bug report for integration into SeaMonkey, and the TraceMonkey bug that caused slowdowns is fixed for both Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 and the upcoming SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3, even though the current versions of the add-on on AMO work around it anyhow.
• Automated tests:
  As I really dislike how test failures on trunk are spreading instead of getting fixed, I filed a number of bugs on all the mochitest-plain and xpcshell test failures we are permanently seeing right now. Please help fixing those!
• Places:
  This week, I pushed really hard for getting the last mile of reviewing done for Places bookmarks, and after I did set up IanN for those, he put in an awesome session and cleared them all for landing! With the addition of Callek's review on some of the core and the tests, I could finally push them into the tree and today's nightlies are the first official builds with the new system, SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 will be the first released milestone to feature it.
  Sorry for everyone whose nerves I stretched over this, but I think having this in now was worth that.
  With that, I filed a bug for playing well with the search panel, as well as a strange JS inclusion issue - and fixing the Modern theme, for the latter, I also have a patch ready that's awaiting reviews.
  In addition, I worked on getting review comments backported to Firefox where applicable, so they profit from our work as well.
• German L10n:
  Again, I landed a patch for Michael Opitz with more help updates.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, German L10n contributor meeting, security bug, user agent string changes, possible organization for SeaMonkey, NNTP and mailing lists and Thunderbird discussions, venkman and SeaMonkey 2.1, the road to libxul, putting debugQA on AMO, SeaMonkey and NVDA, MPL update, update system, etc.

The really large milestone for me this week is of course the landing of places bookmarks after 5 months of working on it and waiting for reviews. There's some post-landing reviews going on and some followup work, but now we get tester feedback on the real thing and can push it out to more of them in the upcoming third alpha, which should go a long to way getting the testing and feedback we need to ship it in a good state in a final 2.1 release a few months from now.
There's a ton of other SeaMonkey work going on though right now, with all this busy hacking, I'm pretty sure that final release will be one to show off, and with some other plans that go on, this project should be heading for great things as a whole - stay tuned for more news on that in the next weeks and months!