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SeaMonkey 2 Alpha Criteria

Since our rework of the SeaMonkey suite to using the "new toolkit" on trunk is making good progress, the SeaMonkey Council has talked about setting up criteria our trunk builds have to meet so we can release a first Alpha for SeaMonkey 2.

The relatively small and compact list of those criteria is:
  1. AUS (automated update service) needs to work,
  2. L10n builds need to be usable,
  3. no major broken functionality,
  4. profiles created or migrated with Alpha need to be in a state that doesn't need re-migration until final.
We agreed that not having two preference windows (like we do have in current nightlies due to the ongoing transition to the new one) is along the lines of c) here, and b) needs password and download manager work, maybe even some shell service stuff.

Being feature-complete or doing any kind of feature or locale freeze is something for the Beta phase, rather than for Alpha.

Point a) in this list mainly means that users of Alphas should be able to utilize AUS for upgrading to later builds, esp. Beta and final builds.

The main requirement for d) is that users who migrated a profile with Alpha don't need further "manual" migration to keep using this profile (or even throw away and re-migrate it) with later builds in the 2.0 series, including final and minor updates.
Things like changing to places history should automigrate existing data, so there's no problem with doing that post-Alpha, a small question may remain open for how to deal with people migrating from Thunderbird and having feeds in those profiles, as we probably want to have them pick those up once we support them, but they may look strange in mailnews currently.

The SeaMonkey Council will start marking Alpha blockers according to that criteria in the next days. Note that minor annoyances probably will not block an Alpha release, though we'd like to see them fixed. We're not targeting a fully cleaned up final release yet, this is still an Alpha and it's neither supposed to be feature-complete nor regression-free, but ready to be tested by a significantly wider range of community members than our usual trunk nightlies.

Entry written by KaiRo and posted on January 3rd, 2008 18:44 | Tags: Mozilla, release, SeaMonkey, SeaMonkey 2 | 3 comments

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    AuthorEntry

    Keith

    quote
    Well, this is cool. The last time I tried a SeaMonkey 2 CVS build, it had two of the big problems that I have with Firefox: crashing every few minutes and no search in the location bar. As appealing as the ability to use Firefox extensions in SeaMonkey (or at least, alter them to work in SeaMonkey pretty easily) is, XPFE is rock solid.

    I probably should try to download and compile off the trunk again. I currently have the source for 1.1.7, which won't compile. Maybe I'll have better luck for the trunk (after all, my .mozconfig file was written for 2 and I tried to adapt it for 1.1.7; maybe that just didn't work).

    The last time I tried SeaMonkey 2, settings were saved to ~/.mozilla.org/seamonkey. That's good, as it can coexist with the Mozilla Suite/SeaMonkey, but I think it would be better to just put it into ~/.mozilla/seamonkey similar to how Firefox does, or simply ~/.seamonkey. Then, when the final is released, you can store the new or migrated profiles in seamonkey2.

    Since I brought up CVS, I seem to recall that the project is intending to move to Mercurial. How's that going?
    2008-01-07 23:27

    KaiRo

    Webmaster

    quote
    Keith:
    The change to using ~/.mozilla/seamonkey has been done a while ago, so the build you tried must really have been some time in the past ;-)

    The change to Mercurial will only happen after SeaMonkey 2, as it's a Gecko 2 thing, and SeaMonkey 2 is based on Gecko 1.9 (same as Firefox 3).
    2008-01-08 16:39

    Keith

    quote
    Yeah, I guess it was a while back. It doesn't seem that long ago, but time does fly. It was just around the time that you guys set it to build with the Firefox toolkit by default.
    2008-01-18 07:04

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