Weekly Status Report, W17/2007

As SeaMonkey continues to be my primary source of income, I feel I should give the community some feedback about what I'm doing for the project in return for the money German users are channeling to me through their Google ad clicks.

This was one of the reasons why I created this blog and started posting various news about SeaMonkey here - but reading the weekly MoFo status reports of F. Hecker, Gerv and Zak, I realized it's interesting to see what's going on in those organizational areas, and doing most SeaMonkey organizational work, it might be interesting to community members to get a glance on that as well (comment if you think otherwise or you want to know more about some specific SeaMonkey behind-the-scenes topics).

So, here's what I've been doing in week 17, 2007 (April 23 - 29):

• Upcoming branch releases:
  Triaging approval/blocking flags for the upcoming 1.0.9 and 1.1.2 releases, pinging people about remaining blockers, bumping version numbers on branches in preparation of the releases, blogging about 1.0 EOL
• Tinderbox/FTP work:
  Cleaned up old builds from tinderbox/build systems, made hoshi tinderbox build again (basically with a reboot) after a strange compiler failure, cleaned up old builds from ftp.m.o tinderbox-builds and nightly/latest-* directories
• Investigated 1.1/1.1.1 AMO dictionary URL issue (see bug 367500, talking about a possible redirect with AMO people, fixed our side of this, which required breaking the branch L10n freeze to some extent, notified m.d.l10n newsgroup about this.
• suiterunner:
  Continued poking of people about the missing links we still need for switching to suiterunner - Mark ("Standard8") is still working on finishing profile migrator (creating the list of prefs to migrate is tedious work) and thinking about download manager (can we borrow code from somewhere else?); Frank ("mcsmurf") is waiting on Rob Strong re-reviewing the NSIS installer patch.
• SeaMonkey Marketing Shop:
  I finally created a shop at cafepress, created some designs for stuff to sell there and did order some items myself for a test run. Expect this to hit the public soon!
• Mozilla Planning/Governance:
  I'm trying to take a very active role in Mozilla planning and governance newsgroup discussions to figure out the best ways to deal with various issues for the whole Mozilla community and in particular for the SeaMonkey project. This week, it's pretty silent there, but some Mozilla2 repository discussions are ongoing, as well as some bugzilla organization discussions.
• L20n:
  In a small circle of people, we started talking about a possible PHP implementation of L20n so that we get really working code on top of the current spec proposal and see how it acts in practice. This is in a very early stage, we're currently discussion license issues - I'll tell you more once we have some actual code in place.
• Various discussions:
  As always, lots of my time spent on SeaMonkey gets investigated in lots of discussions on IRC, in newsgroups and in bugs - topics this week included various issues affecting suiterunner, e.g. mac theming issues, the possibility of toolbar customization, mcsmurf's new CVS account (congrats!) and policy issues we encountered on the way there (what does an area of a super-reviewer mean?), wording of junk prefs, file locations of tab/sidebar close buttons, the suiterunner switch, page info, and others.

Tasks without progress I want to work on next week:

• SeaMonkey slogan(s):
  Need to filter out well-recieved proposals from the newsgroup thread and get some clue how to decide on which one(s) we will be using for marketing material in the immediate future. For the first round of stuff in our new shop, I'm using the www.seamonkey-project.org URL instead of a slogan though, which redirects to our main project site.
• Trademark policy:
  For posting marketing material, we need to have a useful trademark policy. A proposal is in review with MoFo, need to poke Gerv once again about that.