Weekly Status Report, W22/2007

After a quite busy week (both work- and non-work-related) here's the report on my SeaMonkey work in week 22/2007 (May 28 - June 3):

• SeaMonkey releases:
  Those went online on May 30, once more in sync with Firefox/Gecko releases - and I'm proud we could push out new localized packages in 7 languages additional to US English right at the same time as the official release. For our old process with L10n teams creating and contributing the packages themselves, this is quite a nice number. Along with the still usable language packs from 1.1(.1), we now have SeaMonkey 1.1.2 in 15 languages total - for the first time also in Brazilian Portugese.
• suiterunner switch:
  It is done!
  I checked in the patch for the real switch on Tuesday, after Frank had added the NSIS installer on Monday. Also fixed tinderbox configs to build the nightlies correctly. Mark and Frank have fixed a number of problems in migration and installer since, and are still working on newly reported ones.
  If you run into problem with the new "2.0a1pre" builds, look for filed bugs and report new ones if your problem isn't know there.
  Now Camino is the only xpfe-based app left, I hope we get them off that toolkit soon as well so we can clean up the source and finally kill that old code.
• Killing wallet:
  Did look again into the wallet -> satchel change, but I'm now at an interesting point where my (opt) build crashes when I focus any form field, which is not too helpful for working on that.
• places history:
  Last Sunday evening, I was contacted by Mano in IRC about what history implementation we're using in suiterunner, and I had to confess we're still using the xpfe one after looking into the code. He told me it would probably be easy to skip the toolkit version of it and go directly to places history. I
  filed bug 382187 for that and with help from him and biesi, I got the backend to build and work within 3-4 hours (where most of the time was spent tweaking build vars and recompiling). It even automatically imports data from the old mork file into places.sqlite, so visited sites still stay displayed as visited after switching.
  Unfortunately, getting the UI to work with this is harder, as our UI for history stuff is mostly RDF-based and mozstorage data doesn't get presented as RDF. And, which is probably worse, I have much too little coding experience in those areas.
  I did manage to get a Firefox places history panel mostly working in my experimental build, but though the search and sort is nice there, I think I like our old one better functionality-wise (or even better a crossover of them). Unfortunately, it needs a ridiculously big number of files from browser/ to work properly, and one bug caused my error console to fill with one repeated line over and over.
• Themes:
  I again put some work into porting over my EarlyBlue theme to suiterunner, adding support for the (new) help viewer. When I realized this might be a good place to start using PNG files and -moz-image-region, I asked on IRC what the coordinates there exactly meant and ended up writing a layout reftest and improving its documentation for that instead of doing actual theme work for a while. Even though such things are distracting, more people than just me end up profiting from that, I hope.
• Mozpad:
  Took part in the second IRC meeting - I think this project is heading into a good direction, even if some hopes of participants might be set a bit too high for now. Cooperating for a better platform and more docs is a quite important mission though, and everyone should profit from that.
• Various discussions:
  A huge list of suiterunner post-landing discussions around regressions, cleanups and further improvements; continued Firefox3 UI discussions, SeaMonkey icon set and others.

As we have entered the brave new world of the new toolkit now, there's a real lot to do to improve how well SeaMonkey works on it, clean up what we left behind, switch over to the parts of it we're not using yet - and add features that will make SeaMonkey 2 an even better Internet suite. We'd be happy about anyone who can help us in any of those areas.
Oh, and if you can't, test nightlies and report bugs - that's the first step to being a contributor and improving your favorite software!