The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 29/2008 (July 14 - 20, 2008):

• SeaMonkey & Thunderbird on Mercurial:
  Reviews on the comm-central build system seems to be done, we're on the way to switch to Mercurial on Tuesday, July 22, given that we can sort out migration of Thunderbird nightly build machines.
  I also could land the Lighting fixes, so we even can build that calendering extension right from the beginning with both Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.
  I filed a number of followup bugs to that switch, one more mozilla-central bug/patch, and bugs for tracking the switch of build and unit test machines for SeaMonkey.
  Because of this work, I came across a bustage of our old (typeaheadfind) code due to a 1.9.1 fix that went in this week, and we could fix it in time for the switch (thanks Callek and Neil!) so we won't break with that when moving over to hg.
• SeaMonkey Releases:
  I finished up and pushed the SeaMonkey 1.1.11 release on Tuesday as planned, we should now be as secure as Firefox 3.0.1 and 2.0.0.16.
• L10n:
  Continued to take part in the 1.9.1 L10n discussions and posted to m.d.l10n that we will lose L10n builds on SeaMonkey trunk for the time being with the switch to Mercurial. We're planning to reinstate them as soon as the new processes for 1.9.1 are in place and we can adopt them.
  Despite that, I added Catalan to the list of locales we're trying to build on those last days of CVS, so that they get logs from the tinderboxen for those few days.
• Various Discussions:
  FF+ Summit, Modern theme revitalization, shellservice UI, (less) painful mac universal builds, add-on compat override, etc.

The switch to Mercurial is imminent, so everybody building SeaMonkey or Thunderbird himself should be aware of the new build instructions (will update for the final repository once it has actual code). Mozilla Developer Center docs will also be updated with content about comm-central.
After a few weeks of work to get all details working, everything seems to be in place and ready for actually going live now. The final countdown begins, planned start time for the work is Tuesday, 2pm Central European time (5am Pacific), the tree will be closed on CVS at that time and we hope we'll be able to reopen it on Mercurial a few hours later!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 28/2008 (July 7 - 13, 2008):

• SeaMonkey & Thunderbird on Mercurial:
  I finally got buildbots fully up and running so we can have regular builds and nightlies for SeaMonkey after the switch to comm-central - I also came across one more slight mozilla-central bug with Mac universal builds in that, the patch is waiting for review but doesn't block the switch (NSS still works even if it isn't signed for Mac nightly packages for now).
  Now that everything's working, I filed a bug for review on the build system for comm-central and attached patches and fixed the first few review nits.
  One patch for Lighting could land already, two others are waiting on review, but as that extension isn't even fully functional on trunk, being broken a bit more does also not block the switch for now.
• Help Update:
  It's been some time, but I could finally land the patch for updating help to reflect the new helper app preferences panel.
• SeaMonkey Releases:
  Followed along with the release process for SeaMonkey 1.1.11 to catch up with security fixes for Firefox 3.
• L10n:
  More discussions about the 1.9.1 L10n story, esp. if we should have one repo per language or one repo per language and product (I prefer the former).
• Various Discussions:
  FF+ Summit sessions, abook refactoring, (less) painful mac universal builds, OS X abook support, shellservice UI, toolbar customization, German Windows installer, Thunderbird 3 planning, etc.

The 2008 FF+ Summit is nearing, and along with it another timeout from work I'm taking. From August 1, when the Summit ends, until August 9, I'll rent a car and do some traveling from Vancouver through a bit of British Columbia and even more of Washington state, going as far as Mount St. Helens and back again to Vancouver, arriving back in Vienna in the evening of August 10.
So, don't expect a lot of work from me during the Summit and the week after, esp. during that traveling week, I won't check email or other work stuff a lot and concentrate more on sightseeing.
If you know any points of interest or other things I shouldn't miss in that area, let me know and I'll see how I can fit it into my schedule.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 27/2008 (June 30 - July 6, 2008):

• SeaMonkey & Thunderbird on Mercurial:
  This week, I did a lot more work on the test repository for SeaMonkey to get more build configurations working (see build instructions for how to do your own builds), a lot of this resulting from my setting up of buildbots on the SeaMonkey trunk tinderbox machines, so those can take over from the cvs-bound tinderbox clients when we switch to hg (the calemaisu-test nightlies that pop in the SeaMonkey FTP dir are from those, test with care, and notify me of problems with them but don't file bugs).
  We also settled on a name for that new repository, and comm-central was created as a toplevel repository on hg.mozilla.org quite fast.
  Additionally, my patches for some bugs in mozilla-central could be checked in, so our test repo now builds with an out-of-the-box mozilla-central checkout.
  If you want to build Lightning with that repo, you still need a few calendar/ patches, see the build instructions and/or the tracking bug.
  We still need testing of more uncommon build configurations, and running of all test suites (I only have looked into TUnit, but not into ref/crash/mochitests yet) - and the release of Shredder Alpha 2 before we are ready to do the switch.
  Watch the comm-central activation bug to be notified on the switch when it happens - or read this blog.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  We held our first SeaMonkey status meeting, where we decided that fully localized builds, and therefore password and download manager reworks are no hard alpha blockers, only finishing the preference window migration is. We also got status reports from a number of people doing active work, see the meeting notes for details. The next such meeting is on July 15 at 12:00 UTC in #seamonkey.
• SeaMonkey Releases:
  While SeaMonkey 1.1.10 was released almost on schedule on July 2nd, I immediately started over the release process for SeaMonkey 1.1.11, which is target for July 15 (candidate builds are already available). This release will sync us up with the Firefox 3.0.x security release cycles, mainly containing a fix for the zero-day vulnerability found in Firefox 3, as well as a small collection of other security fixes.
  I know that with not having partial updates, such short release cycles are a pain, but I hope we can avoid those in the future for SeaMonkey 1.1.x - this time it would both have been bad to not have fixed out in sync with the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in both Gecko 1.8.1.13 (SeaMonkey 1.1.9) and Gecko 1.8.1.15 (SeaMonkey 1.1.10), so we need(ed) to ship updates with those fixes on both near-to-each-other Gecko release dates.
• L10n:
  Lots of discussions about the 1.9.1 L10n story, esp. if we should have one repo per language or one repo per language and product (I prefer the former).
• Various Discussions:
  Session (re)store, oranges due to non-ideal testcases, abook refactoring, (less) painful mac universal builds, OS X abook support, shellservice UI, removing old localized nightlies, German Windows installer, Code Rush, Thunderbird 3 planning, etc.

It's good to see how much is actually going on in the SeaMonkey world, as one can see on the notes of the status meeting - I'm pretty confident we'll get an alpha soon, still this summer, and it probably will even be already based on a Gecko 1.9.1-pre-version and our hg repository. Stay tuned and help us getting even farther down this road!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 26/2008 (June 23 - 29, 2008):

• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  We had a meeting on the shared hg/1.9.1 repository this week, and decided to have calendar, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey all in one shared repository in the future.
  I started work on a test repository, got builds to work from it (see build instructions), now all we need is getting up build machines (so we have the setup we need for them), get all my code changes reviewed, and find a name for the repository.
  Work on this test repository resulted in my filing of a few bugs and patches with mozilla-central and calendar so both are well-usable with our setup. For now, those patches need to be manually applied, until they get review and can be checked in.
  Oh, and get more testing of this test repository, along with probably some additional small fixes for problem that come up in that testing.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  We could finally announce our first SeaMonkey status meeting, which was actually held on July 1 and was quite successful, with the next one upcoming on July 15 at 12:00 UTC.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.10 Release:
  I followed along with the release process, targeted for a July 1 release (which got delayed half a day because of almost the whole Mozilla build & release team celebrating Canada Day or being on the move).
  Note that we will do a 1.1.11 on a very short cycle, targeted for July 15, to sync up with the Firefox 3.0.x security release cycles.
• Various Build Stuff:
  I checked in Serge's patch to remove xml-rpc from the build so we don't need this extension with the move to hg.
  Our tinderbox VMs were down after a ESX server reboot (got stuck somehow) and needed to be restarted.
  A first fix for hg-based SeaMonkey got into mozilla-central with toolkit not calling mailnews makefiles.sh.
• L10n:
  I had some discussions about L20n, and about the 1.9.1 L10n story (which is not there yet, not even for Firefox).
  I also fixed a typo in German security dialogs in time for Firefox 3.0.1.
• Various Discussions:
  Session (re)store, forks vs. shared code in mailnews UI files, Smart location Bar and SeaMonkey, version numbering, Thunderbird 3 planning, mozilla-central/1.9.1, etc.

The topic came up on the status meeting, and I already have though hard about this for a while now: Do we really need to release localized version of our first alpha? Now, the good thing with this would be that we could test the new (for SeaMonkey) "source L10n" infrastructure and get more testers if they can test in their own languages. The bad thing is that we made download manager and password manager reworks being blockers of the alpha just because we decided to not adopt the still-in-use old versions to this new L10n infrastructure and so they are broken in localized releases. An additional factory is that we will probably switch to hg and the Mozilla 1.9.1 platform before an alpha, and the platform itself has no L10n story for that version yet (it's being figured out currently but nobody knows when it will be in place).
Given that fact and shipping an alpha at all being more important than having localizations, I'm agreeing with the status meeting outcome of probably going for an en-US-only alpha and not making download and password managers hard blockers any more. This is a bit unfortunate, but at least we get nearer to showing off anything of SeaMonkey 2 to a wider public than nightly testers. We still are left with one blocker, and that is us needing all preference panels to be ported to the new prefwindow, the current double prefwindow stuff is nothing we want in an alpha. So, we are happy about any help we can get there, there's some not-too-hard UI-only work to be done there.
And sorry localizers - we'll still be working on getting full L10n support as soon as possible, even if not for this alpha!