Weekly Status Report, W26/2007

This week ended for me with spending lots of time helping on a local town festival and fixing up my laptop, but apart from that, here's a summary of SeaMonkey work I managed to do in week 26/2007 (June 25 - July 1):

• Next round of releases:
  The schedule for Firefox 2.0.0.5 has been posted, we'll try to once again snyc up with that and do a SeaMonkey 1.1.3 security and stability release at the same time.
• Bugzilla reorganization:
  Continuing discussion in m.d.planning about bmo structure, and it's still improving. Unfortunately we need to clutter the SeaMonkey product with a few components from old xpfe until branch is EOLed.
• places history:
  Checked in the patch for building toolkit mork history for non-places non-SeaMonkey apps only, which should ease our way to getting the backend switch implemented.
• debugQA:
  Mark put lots of work into making in-tree debug UI an extension so it's easier for us to switch it off for release builds. This will probably even allow testers who want it to use this extension on releases if they want. I hacked up a fix for our override to always use en-US for this as long as we don't support optional localization of such an in-tree extension.
  Additionally, I tried to get some solution for only displaying the build ID in the title bar when this extension is activated. I was pointed to Nightly Tester Tools (NTT), one features of which is to do exactly that for Firefox - and Mossop told me that NTT should install fine and work on toolkit-based SeaMonkey. When I wanted to test that, I ended up crashing in XPInstall code and debugging this with timeless, as I had hit this on my debug build. Due to this debugging session we did, he ended up knowing what the problem is (multithreading fun with JSContexts), and we can hope to see a patch soon.
• User Agent discussions:
  The whole UA discussion that Camino started with their decisions to add "like Firefox" to the string (already checked in), and which I contributed to with my blog rant and proposal/idea is still going strong: A proposal to not tell websites that Firefox is "Firefox" at all came up, as well as a proposal to make the SeaMonkey UA really suck. I'm opposed to both variants. User agents should be clear, informative and to the point (even our current one isn't really there), neither removing the actual name of the user agent from the string nor adding names of other user agents helps that.
  I have yet to see any better option than the proposal I made - but we also still need someone to work on coding up that solution that will help both users and evangelizers and could therefore help to make the whole web a better place.
• German L10n sync:
  Discussions are ongoing, I hope we'll get towards more consistency soon. I need to update at least one followup patch before it can get in.
• Breakpad:
  Now that the new breakpad crash reporter is basically working on all three major platforms, it would be nice to start testing/using it for SeaMonkey some time. Before that will happen (needs off infrastructure of that new code to be tested well enough), we want to add what SeaMonkey needs for it to work but in a disabled state. I had to update the patch I made for that this week as bug 383167 kept popping in and out the tree, making SeaMonkey switch back and forth between "traditional" nsSuiteApp.cpp and "modern" application.ini carrying that information.
  We're still waiting on an OK from Mozilla IT folks to use the mozilla.com socorro server for our crash reports though.
  Meanwhile, Talkback should be running again for Linux and Windows builds on trunk after some rework of the packaging on MoFo tinderbox machines.
• Various discussions:
  Firefox 3 UI: location bar, places/bookmarks/tagging, content handling (all of those could be interesting for SeaMonkey); HunSpell, application update service, and others

Items where nothing happened this week but which I hope to to get some traction on again:

• xpfe cleanup:
  Still need to look into that again soon, but it might be easier now that I don't care if Camino breaks (it's "like Firefox", it can't depend on any xpfe stuff, right? ).
• Killing wallet:
  Neil should be back, I hope to see patches from him soon that bring autocomplete up to a state where satchel starts working.

As a side note, I have been nominated for the Mozilla Foundation ED Search Committee, which will be working to find the next Executive Director for our official backing organization, the Mozilla Foundation. I feel honored by being nominated and hope to be able to serve the Mozilla community as a whole if I'll really can take part in that committee.