Weekly Status Report, W24/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 24/2008 (June 9 - 15, 2008):

• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  I again spent a lot of time this week with figuring out SeaMonkey and Thunderbird building with mozilla-central, blogging about it and posting on the newsgroups about this topic, as well as fiddling out more details, like removing (almost) all the hacks I had in my build setup in the beginning. And, of course, I discussed the topic with people on IRC.
  Additionally, I got Lightning to build (but not install yet), which I still need to document (and which needs a few fixes build-wise when calendar goes hg). From discussions on IRC, I feel we badly need to discuss the whole topic with calendar people directly, as our views of the future world diverge a bit there.
  The L10n story is still something I need to figure out, it might still need some tweaks.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  We had a small bit of discussion about this on IRC, we might go for biweekly meetings, not sure if we'll do them on the phone or on IRC though.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.10 Release:
  It's been some time, but finally, another security release is for 1.1.x is due later this month - I took the first steps on the release process, i.e. version update and tagging on the release branch, as well as starting the generation of 1.1.10 candidates.
• Various Discussions:
  OS X address book, cleaning out old L10n nightlies, session (re)store, toolbar improvements, treelines, tab preview, Thunderbird/mailnews development, mozilla-central/1.9.1, etc.

A discussion about the status of SeaMonkey Composer came up on newsgroups, and it's pretty interesting: I'm reading a lot about different people and groups using and promoting SeaMonkey Composer for designing simple HTML pages, I heard of teachers using it in classes, and recently, even a German publishing house sent a request for putting SeaMonkey on their book CD as they described how to use it in the book.
Composer is becoming one of the strong arguments for SeaMonkey nowadays, it seems, especially in the light of all the spinoffs either being unmaintained (Nvu), unfinished ("Mozilla Composer") or still based on old code (KompoZer). We have the only stable release of Composer code that's based on Gecko 1.8(.1), and the only development series of it that works with 1.9.x.
Unfortunately, the Composer-specific code is also not actively developed (a lot of the functionality is shared with mailcompose and Midas though), while we still maintain it to a state that it stays working and can be released even in SeaMonkey 2. If someone comes up and works on improving this code, possibly even porting improvements from Nvu/KompoZer to our code, it would be very much appreciated and find a good base of users.