Weekly Status Report, W05/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related tasks I worked on in week 05/2008 (January 28 - Febrary 3, 2008):

• Tinderbox changes:
  For one thing, the SeaMonkey waterfall pages finally have introduction paragraphs that resemble current state of the builds shown there.
  Additionally, we had an interesting orange phase of our unit testr tinderbox this week, and it turned out that all tinderboxen for all products still tried to run all tests with the Modern theme - even for applications that don't have it (which did fall back to their default). I changed tinderbox to leave the default theme instead (unless it's running Mozilla suite or SeaMonkey 1.1.x, where we stay with Modern for consistent test numbers).
• Places support:
  I'm still running my local builds with places history enabled, which works well in the current stage for the most part if one doesn't need a history window or sidebar (which shouldn't be that hard to fix for someone who knows XUL/JS and trees well enough). When I looked into the error console this week, I saw a chrome://browser URI mentioned there and tracked it down to be a bug in toolkit places support, which I created a patch for. Hopefully we can get this in soon, so places in the 1.9 toolkit will be ready for us to switch - independently of us actually doing this or not. (Note once again that this is all about the backend, we don't want the UI for history or even bookmarks to change significantly.)
• Release work - SeaMonkey 1.1.8:
  I created and uploaded (two sets of) candidate builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.8 this week, which is our upcoming security release for the stable 1.1.x series. We target a release nearly in sync with Firefox 2.0.0.12 this Thursday or Friday.
• Extension nightlies:
  After a FTP directory for extensions has been created, I set my venkman and ChatZilla tinderbox cycles (reorting to MozillaTest) to upload their builds to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/extensions/ - so we now get nightly builds of those extensions and their language packs in the form that the Makefile process of the Mozilla build systems generates.
  Those build may not be 100% the same as generated by the XPI build scripts, but I think we should get them to match as closely as possible. Also, we want the directory to be available through HTTP for better load balancing.
• Source L10n:
  Spanish (as in "Spain") is the newest SeaMonkey trunk addition, Norwegian now also has ChatZilla and venkman localized on trunk.
• German L10n:
  We kept up with the pre-FF3b3 checkin rush and I also fixed some consistency and other errors in the SeaMonkey trunk localization.
• Various Discussions:
  kill-wallet i.e. switching to LoginManager, plans for MailNews future, IPC and OpenPGP, new prefwindow, AMO integration, etc.

I'd like to highlight that web feed detection has landed in SeaMonkey trunk this week, which means that one now gets the already familiar RSS icon with a selection to subscribe feeds when visiting sites that offer them. We still do NOT have any internal feed handling though, bugs for feed preview, livemarks and an integrated feed reader are still open - but the first step in the right direction is done.

Oh, and sorry that I've not been as responsive as usually in the last few days, I found a really cheap set of Age of Empires I & II plus expansion packs in a local store, and I figure I need to get into a bit of nostalgia again, so I've been spending a few hours trying out certain scenarios there, with a few hours of watching a "pretty f***in' awesome" Super Bowl game on Sunday - I'm pretty sure those activities won't hurt SeaMonkey development even if I'm spending a bit of time with them