Weekly Status Report, W09/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 09/2008 (February 25 - March 2, 2008):

• Sanitize:
  The patch for sanitize ("Clear Private Data") got review and I could check it in. Shortly afterwards, some people discovered it's not working correctly in nightlies yet, which is due to a packaging issue that should be fixed for tomorrow's nightlies.
• Other Preferences Work:
  My application panel patch now has partial review, and should be nearing completion (hopefully) soon.
  I updated the appearance prefs patch when it worked with trunk code for some time when a loadOverlay fix was in - unfortunately that caused regressions and had to be backed out. The content panel should get ready to go, though.
• (Automated) Tests & Components.* Shorthands:
  With the "sanitize" patch (see above), I also ported some tests to SeaMonkey, which we could even run automatically when the test frameworks would work flawlessly in SeaMonkey and we had test machines.
  The latter probably needs some more poking from my side, but the former is not as hard as one would believe: the sanitize tests were in the browser mochitest suite, and it only needed a fairly easy change to get that running with SeaMonkey. Of the currently available tests in that framework, all run fine except 2 tests that require FUEL and 8 that need the toolkit download manager (which we plan to get in alpha).
  When fixing those tests ran into a problem with Cc/Ci definitions, I started a small IRC discussion about those Components.* shorthands and discovered that this is not only something we stumble over in SeaMonkey work, but a Mozilla-global mess, and filed a bug on fixing that.
• Source L10n:
  We added Spanish (es-ES) localizations for ChatZilla and venkman.
• German L10n:
  After DOM inspector was killed from the Firefox default build, I took the chance of easier review/approval requirements and updated the de L10n for it to trunk.
  Additionally, I fixed a few typos that were filed as bugs with FF3b3 and added sanitize strings right after the main checkin.
• Various Discussions:
  California traveling, password/login manager, "Save Link As...", feed support, 1.9 management, Thunderbird/MailNews conference scheduling, etc.

It looks like the long hours I put into a few pref panels in the last weeks, spending more time on code than usual, slowly has an effect on the nightly builds, which is good to see. There's a lot more of stuff to do though, and we really need to pick up those tasks and get to a stage we can call "alpha" as soon as reasonably doable. We have not been releasing a major final or a alpha/beta for more than a year now, and we keep touting out to people how beautiful the world of SeaMonkey 2 will be, so we should put some credibility behind that and give them a build that can be tested by a larger audience than our nightlies.
I hope we can pick up the remaining tasks soon enough to not lose people to competitors because they think the old (Mozilla/SeaMonkey 1.x) suite is dead meat.
We know after all that the new (SeaMonkey 2) suite is more alive than ever before!