Weekly Status Report, W47/2007

Another week has passed, and here's a short summary of the SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 47/2007 (November 19 - 25):

• SeaMonkey Releases:
  Started the 1.1.7 release process with candidates and all other required stuff with a target release date of today, but had to pull back and prepare for a respin right when I wanted to push it due to a <canvas> regression. We still hope to release this week.
• Directed Donation Program:
  In collaboration with MoFo, I prepared the SeaMonkey side of the directed donation program recently, pushed it to the public this week, and announced it on my blog and the SeaMonkey website.
• SeaMonkey Website:
  I did rewrite the news parts of the new SeaMonkey Website so that they are driven by a single XML file - this affects the news page, the news section of the main page and the Atom 1.0 feed I added in that process (currently only linked as alternative view to the news page, will link it more publicly soon).
  I also created release notes for 1.1.7 and did some small improvements on other places. And there's a bug report now for changing URLs in SeaMonkey to directly point to the new website.
• SeaMonkey Project Structure:
  Was too busy to drive this forward in that week, will pick it up again soon.
• Smaller SeaMonkey Changes:
  Thanks to Mark Banner, we're now building PalmSync again on trunk, so Palm users on Windows can sync their address books with SeaMonkey trunk.
  Discussions continued about launching 1.1.x branch/release builds of SeaMonkey from read-only installations. Neil has fixed the main issue in 1.1.7, but the issue with launching directly from Mac DMG images is still there, we investigated further how to fix that last case.
  I created a first patch to split error page strings into a generic and a app-specific part, so that SeaMonkey could just override the app-specific file and be able to provide hooks for adding SSL certificate exceptions similarly to Firefox trunk. We found a minor problem, but this looks good.
  After some comments of the first draft, Basil Hashem from Mozilla Corp. created an updated AMO design that should fit SeaMonkey as well as Firefox and the other products well. Due to some discussion around our linking of AMO in the main menu of our new website, some bugs were filed to improve the SeaMonkey AMO experience and getting SeaMonkey users to the right place should also be possible for the next AMO release. I hope this can improve the situation for SeaMonkey Add-Ons users, along with our SeaMonkey 2 rework and whatever improvements they can make to the review process (apparently that's being discussed in the AMO team as a general problem).
• KaiRo.at Bug Bounty Program:
  The Bug Bounty Program I set up from my corporate money is progressing nicely, as Teune van Steeg has now introduced browser notification bars used for blocked extension installs as well as the plugin finder service. By collecting those bounties, Teune has helped us a major step forward in the SeaMonkey 2 user experience. Thanks a lot!
• Source L10n:
  We have 6 localizations in addition to en-US generating nightly builds on trunk, so far this seems to work fine
  I also fixed a security source file to be more friendly to localizers, both for those manually editing them as well as those using tools.
  CVS-based ChatZilla langpacks are stuck a bit, I need to get more input about one unclarity I still have.
• German L10n:
  Some more work to keep up with trunk, but reviews are pending. I started a thread in our newsgroup about how to find a way out of this non-greenness we have most of the time.
• Various Discussions:
  Window icons, Send-mail crash, cert override UI, feed discovery and support, login manager, dictionary licensing, etc.

I start realizing there's a bad thing with releasing as often as we do lately: I spent much more time in the release process for stability, correctness and security updates than working for the future of SeaMonkey. I hope that trend will reverse again soon...