Weekly Status Report, W40/2007

I didn't blog much this week, but things are still progressing nicely. Here's a summary of my SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work in week 40/2007 (October 1 - 7):

• Window Icons:
  Some discussion and improvements on the proposed new window icons have been done, while some might not like the overall direction I think most people appreciate the long overdue refreshing of those icons.
• Branding Cleanup:
  I worked out the rest of the needed changes for removing Navigator branding from the UI and could also get in the editor part, with the help changes waiting for review and checkin.
• Extension Nightlies (venkman):
  The new venkman team wanted to get nightly builds available, so I did set up a box that reports to the MozillaTest tinderbox page currently, and went through some interesting challenges as tinderbox wasn't originally made for building an extension only.
  I found though that it's not that hard to get up with some slight adaptions to tinderbox code. I also found we had some specialized code for uploading specifically the lightning and xforms extensions when built and created some generic code to handle this instead, which also can be used for venkman in my case or any other extension tinderboxes. I filed a bug and patch for those improvements I'm running, I hope we can get this into official tinderbox source.
  Now the last step left is getting a place to upload to, I hope this can be done soon. We'll then have the venkman that gets built by the Makefile build system uploaded, not the makexpi.sh-generated one, so we might need to make the former one include install.js to provide the same experience, but everything else should work nicely, I think.
  If the ChatZilla team wants, we can also do that for them once it's built as a real extension.
• Linux Tinderbox Update:
  The Mozilla build and IT teams have done some work to upgrade our Linux tinderbox to the new reference platform, which magically fixed a huge startup speed regression we saw when switching from xpfe to toolkit, maybe connected with the newer system tools used by CentOS 5 compared to the older version we were running previously. This may increase the software requirements of our trunk nightly (and probably release) builds, but we're just moving to the same level as Firefox3/Minefield trunk builds, so I hope that's ok for in turn still having nightlies even after checkin of some changes that wouldn't build on the older system (because of e.g. too old pango).
  My job onthis was just to sit tight and watch, and make sure I still have access to the new machine after the change
• Source L10n:
  Not much happened there, but the Linux tinderbox change was something I was waiting for before trying to get our nightly tinderboxen to also do locale repackaging.
• German L10n:
  Some Updates to Core L10n were necessary this week, another one is still waiting for review, and I also needed to do a bit of work to keep suite L10n complete - but we're keeping de pretty well in shape for a diverse team and trunk work
• SeaMonkey 2 Core Tracking Bugs:
  I created two bugs for tracking things in Core we still need or would like to see for SeaMonkey 2. While we can track things nicely with blocking flags in our own Bugzilla components or use whiteboard comments on them, we don't have flags and don't want to pollute whiteboards for other products. As "Core", i.e. all the Mozilla infrastructure we share with Firefox, is more and more in a freezing phase for the 1.9 cycle, we need some way to show what changes there are still important for us to happen.
  The Core bugs causing problems for SeaMonkey 2 tracker points to the heavy issues that we absolutely need or which require nasty hacking on our side to get SeaMonkey 2 out at all (i.e. those bugs we probably would consider blocking-seamonkey2+) - no need to get things on this list though that are already Firefox 3 blockers, though.
  Core fixes that would help SeaMonkey 2 development are our list of things we'd really like to see and which possibly can still make the cut (no place for utopic wishes here), but which are not really necessary for us to deliver SeaMonkey 2.
  If you want to get bugs on those lists, please nominate them with a sufficient description of why they are relevant there. Please only add bugs yourself if you are in the core developmer group of SeaMonkey, and even then add good, but short explanations of why they fit on that list.
• Various Discussions:
  "Turbo mode" removal on trunk, auto-update system, profile switching, prefwindow rework, login manager, Classic and new default theme, mailnews development, etc.

I just started working on the first candidate builds for 1.1.5, so everyone who can help testing, please tune into mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey and/or #seamonkey in the next few days!