Weekly Status Report, W03/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related tasks I worked on in week 03/2008 (January 14 - 20, 2008):

• Tinderbox and Extensions:
  I checked in my patch for being improvements to tinderbox extension handling, Mozilla boxen compiling Lightning and XForms are using that code instead of hacks specific to those extensions now. My tinderboxes that generate venkman and ChatZilla nightlies also use that code now, unfortunately we still miss a directory to upload such extensions.
• Automated Update Service:
  SeaMonkey AUS support should be working with nightlies for the most part now, as I turned on pushing of update info to the server and Mark added UI support for updates later in the week.
  This means that now you should be able to check for updates in nightlies, as well as download and install full updates. We don't create "partial" updates for nightly builds yet, as this requires more more on the nightly build system (the Mozilla build team is working to get that for all our software), and the issue with updates for localized builds on Mac is still unresolved. We also may have some other glitches, but most of the work seems to be done here to get what we need for Alpha in this area.
• Lightning supprt:
  I did take a lot at the errors Lightning is producing when turned on in SeaMonkey, and did find a few small changes we could make to come nearer to making Lightning work with SeaMonkey. There's much more to be done here, and I'm not sure how much I can and will work on this, but when my patches are in, we can at least switch between calendar and mail modes as well as display and edit calendars and events. Note that even this needs trunk code of both Lightning and SeaMonkey, plus the patches I submitted to the bug.
• Source L10n:
  I landed CVS-based venkman language packs, and could already add support for German, French, Russian and Swedish for this JavaScript Debugger extension. Later in the week, I also added support for those language packs to the SeaMonkey Windows installer, which now installs the correct language pack (if it exists) when (and only when) the user installs venkman - which is the default but can be unchecked.
  I also filed a bug for AMO support of such extension language packs.
  In other "source L10n" news, I added Norwegian to the list of SeaMonkey trunk locales, which makes us produce trunk nightlies in up to 10 languages (including en-US) now - as long as localizers keep their translation updated in CVS.
• German L10n:
  I landed German support for venkman, which now makes SeaMonkey trunk builds being completely localized (except download and password managers, which just don't work in localized builds currently). Additionally, some other work was needed to keep trunk up and running, which I also too care of. Finally, Micheal Opitz contributed another Update of German SeaMonkey help, thanks for that.
• Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Search:
  We interviewed three more candidates this week, it becomes clear over time that this process takes longer than expected, as it's already quite hard to find the 3-4 people we want to take to a second round of interviews. People who are leader types, understand open-source and community processes very well and are willing to take this job are obviously rare.
• Various Discussions:
  Preferences window migration, ChatZilla as optional installer component, feed support, www.mozilla.org website, FOSDEM, etc.

There are two thing I want to add at this place:
I have turned off nightly build cycles for the Mozilla 1.8.0 branch on my private machines, so no SeaMonkey 1.0.x nightlies are being built any more. We haven't intended to do any more release of that series for some time now, stopping to produce nightlies about 7 months after the last release from that branch seems to be a lot of time for people to adapt to not using those builds any more.
The second item I want to shed some light on is the Mozilla Meeting at FOSDEM 2008 which will take place on February 23/24 in Brussels, Belgium. I'm sure this will once again be a good place to meet many of our fellow Mozillians - and for those who want to hear about things going on in community project management and SeaMonkey 2, I will give a talk titled "And the beast shall come forth..." - Hope to meet you there as well!