Weekly Status Report, W28/2007

Here's the summary of SeaMonkey work I did in week 28/2007 (July 9 - 15):

• Releases:
  Firefox 2.0.0.5 has been moved forward to happening the upcoming week already (!) because of the firefoxurl: vulnerability - at least if no further patches to include in this release come up.
  For us, this means, we will need to go fast if we want to release SeaMonkey 1.1.3 in sync with this release.
  (By the way, SeaMonkey 1.x seems to not be vulnerable to this mentioned security problem, as the affected code was only introduced with Firefox' Vista support, and we never adopted that. So we don't have good Vista support, but one security problem less.)
• Cleanup of Old xpfe Code:
  I managed to remove xpinstall/packager from cvs - at least everything but 3 files that are still used from elsewhere. I even could remove a few unused files from toolkit/mozapps/installer/ in the process.
  Whoever hasn't realized it yet, creating tar/zip packages for any apps can be done via "make package" from the (objdir) toplevel directory nowadays. Be sure not to try a make in xpinstall/packager any more, there's no makefile left there.
  The next target in this area is removing xpinstall/wizard as well.
• Breakpad:
  As reported earlier on this blog, I could move SeaMonkey to the new, open source "Breakpad" crash reporter tool now. The old, proprietary Talkback tool is not needed any more on trunk.
• sea-win32-tbox Failure:
  While working on getting me access to the SeaMonkey tinderboxen (all community projects get control of their MoCo-hosted tinderboxen), Chris Cooper from the MoCo build team encountered a very strange failure of our SeaMonkey Windows machine. I've been working with him as much as I could to find a solution, but we failed so far. We hope we can get this fixed very soon.
• Source L10n:
  As a further step to SeaMonkey "source L10n", I could check in a patch to move searchplugins to locales. After some discussion on that topic, I decided that we will only support PNG icon images for searchplugins added by localizers - so localizers should convert any GIF icons they might have for plugins in their language to PNG. The backend continues to support all of GIF, PNG and JP(E)G files, so Add-On searchplugins are NOT affected, this is only for those added by localizers in CVS.
  We don't support Firefox' OpenSearch XML format yet, we still stick with sherlock plugins, but we use the same style of list.txt and fallback as Firefox L10n for selecting which plugins to include, so localizers don't need to add 1:1 copies of any plugins we already have in en-US, they just need to add/leave their name in list.txt to have them included.
  I also did a new patch for langpacks and L10n repackaging, which should take us the next step towards the goal of CVS-based L10n for SeaMonkey.
• German L10n:
  I resolved a few long-time open bugs on SeaMonkey L10n, and I made German toolkit/ L10n complete again. We're also currently in the process of finishing up a discussion about translation of "want"/"would", so I hope we should come to a conclusion and new versions of my sync patches soon.
  Repeatedly, such discussions bring up cases where the original wordings could be improved, the most recent one is about superfluous HTTP Auth. I'd hope that localizers of other language also do bring such issues that arise while localizing back to the original en-US by filing bugs. This way, we can improve the UI for everyone.
• Crashes:
  No, I didn't fix crashes unfortunately. But since I'm using trunk now for everyday work, I'm actually encountering a few, and using a debug build for all that work, I'm able to file some stack traces.
  I just hope those developers who know more of the C++ code can also find fixes for those.
• UA Spoofing:
  I filed a bug on my proposal of a dynamic UA spoofing solution and wrote a rough spec for it. I really hope we get someone to work on this.
• (Undisclosed Project):
  I spent quite some time of a project I'm planning to do as a business which is SeaMonkey-related, but I can't disclose it yet to the public, as some formalities are not yet finished. Be sure to hear some great news soon.
• MoFo ED Search Commitee:
  I had a phone call about the search commitee for a new Mozilla Foundation executive director, which I'm taking part in. I hope I can serve the whole Mozilla community with helping to get someone in this position who really fits us well, and who understands and can support as much of this large community as possible.
• Small Things:
  Hopefully the -moz-image-region reftest I have been talking about a few weeks ago can be added soon, as I now know where to add it, did a patch and requested review.
  If you might actually read blog entries of mine on home.kairo.at with a recent trunk build, you might have noticed a horizontal scrollbar appearing uselessly. I tracked this down to a layout regression and filed it with along with a simplified testcase.
  I also filed bugs on an interesting table rendering bug I encountered and the POP3 new-message check failure, both happening on trunk.
  And I wrote up my XULRunner wishlist, which includes items from the SeaMonkey and L210n areas.
• Various Discussions:
  Finishing touches on the Bugzilla reorganization,Firefox 3 location bar, moving from wallet to satchel/pwdmgr, printUtils work, newsgroup reordering, etc.

After recovering my recently broken laptop system, I dared to upgrade it to the openSUSE FACTORY distribution, which is the openSUSE for what we call "the trunk", i.e. the bleeding edge development version for the next release, which is openSUSE 10.3 in their case. They are near to 10.3 Alpha 6 right now (alpha6 doesn't feel too unfamiliar for this point in time), but from the short looks I got, this doesn't feel like an Alpha distribution at all, it's pretty decent actually. It looks like openSUSE 10.3 will be a great product, and worth upgrading also my servers to (which I had planned anyways).