Weekly Status Report, W30/2007

I took some time off on Sunday and Monday's time just ran through my fingers, so once again this status report runs late, even later than in some other cases...
Still, here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I did in week 30/2007 (July 23 - 29):

• Releases:
  I uploaded a few more builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.3 this week, and spent some time assessing if/when we might need a relatively fast 1.1.4 release for some important fixes that also make Firefox do a quick 2.0.0.6 - and closing the security hole that could possibly be exploited when sending mail with SeaMonkey set as the default mail client using a browser like IE6. It's apparently not that easy to trigger, but still well worth fixing. Oh, and the best workaround to not be vulnerable is to only use the SeaMonkey browser when you have SeaMonkey set as the default mail client on Windows
• Breakpad activation
  Apparently, when we integrated the Breakpad crash report tool recently, we missed a tiny variable definition so that it didn't get actually enabled. I spotted Thunderbird folks fixing the same problem and did the same for SeaMonkey. Seeing reports coming in shortly after that convinced me that we really have this working now
• Build and tinderbox issues:
  When our friend Ted ("luser") tried to help us and fix an interesting issue with filepicker theming, he broke Windows builds completely, I checked in the fix he pointed me to. When then had to deal with startup crashes he also helped me fix. When having a few crashes on one of our tinderboxes, I grew tired of logging in and clicking away the dialog fast, so I finally disabled sending crash reports from those boxes. And while I was looking into configurations, I also cleaned up their mozconfig files, leaving out all unneeded/default options.
  As the startup crasher mentioned above involved files missing from Windows packaging, I also did some work to make a simple script run on my private tpol tinderbox (listed on SeaMonkey-Ports) that diffs file lists of dist/bin (pre-packaging) and dist/seamonkey (for-packaging), which makes it easier to find such unpackaged files and add them to the packages file as needed.
• Wallet to satchel conversion:
  After Neil finished up his great work on making xpfe autocomplete compatible with toolkit far enough, we now could actually do the swich from wallet to satchel for auto-filling of web forms. In current trunk builds, you'll notice a nice dropdown with previously entered options in any textboxes of webforms you fill as a result of this recent change.
  And there's more to come - the next target is to get the new login manager to take over password management so we can throw out the old and unmaintained wallet code completely.
• MoFo ED Search Committee:
  We had our first phone conference, talking about how this process of interviewing will work, I think some notes about should be posted soon. We want to keep this as transparent to the community as possible, though there will be a first phase where we can't tell candidates or where they are coming from in the public, of course. Before a decision can be made, we plan to have an open round where the community can participate in the interviews, but first the candidates and ourselves must feel comfortable enough that they can step in front of this wide community and reveal their personalities.
• Source L10n:
  When looking into packaging as pointed out above, I ran into mailViews.dat not being localizable from CVS for default profiles (not even on Thunderbird), and filed that.
  The move away from wallet, also pointed out above, will resolve one of the still open areas of source L10n. We're not there, but we're coming closer and closer.
  One point I'll need to investigate now is how/if we can set up mechanisms/machines that build langpacks and do repackaging of builds so we get localized nightlies.
  Following that, I'll also need to look into what to do with releases, but that's probably an even more complicated topic.
• German L10n:
  Reviews for my big sync patches are coming in and I integrated some of those comments locally already, but I'm a bit overwhelmed with work atm, I might need some time to work through the rest of those huge comment lists.
• (Undisclosed Project):
  The groundwork for SeaMonkey-related business project should now be finished for the most part, I hope I can announce it in the next few days.
• Various Discussions:
  Thunderbird future, FF3 URLbar experiments, automatic update system, accessibility slowdown, Vista compatibility, trunk freezes and milestones, FF3 download manager UI, etc.

I'm currently a bit swamped with work but I also realized I need to spend at least some of my time on things that are not related with this work, maybe even try to not always avoid the harsh glow of the daystar, accepting it to do some bike tours around Vienna or such. Maybe such activities can even increase my work efficiency - we'll see about that