Weekly Status Report, W26/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 26/2008 (June 23 - 29, 2008):

• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  We had a meeting on the shared hg/1.9.1 repository this week, and decided to have calendar, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey all in one shared repository in the future.
  I started work on a test repository, got builds to work from it (see build instructions), now all we need is getting up build machines (so we have the setup we need for them), get all my code changes reviewed, and find a name for the repository.
  Work on this test repository resulted in my filing of a few bugs and patches with mozilla-central and calendar so both are well-usable with our setup. For now, those patches need to be manually applied, until they get review and can be checked in.
  Oh, and get more testing of this test repository, along with probably some additional small fixes for problem that come up in that testing.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  We could finally announce our first SeaMonkey status meeting, which was actually held on July 1 and was quite successful, with the next one upcoming on July 15 at 12:00 UTC.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.10 Release:
  I followed along with the release process, targeted for a July 1 release (which got delayed half a day because of almost the whole Mozilla build & release team celebrating Canada Day or being on the move).
  Note that we will do a 1.1.11 on a very short cycle, targeted for July 15, to sync up with the Firefox 3.0.x security release cycles.
• Various Build Stuff:
  I checked in Serge's patch to remove xml-rpc from the build so we don't need this extension with the move to hg.
  Our tinderbox VMs were down after a ESX server reboot (got stuck somehow) and needed to be restarted.
  A first fix for hg-based SeaMonkey got into mozilla-central with toolkit not calling mailnews makefiles.sh.
• L10n:
  I had some discussions about L20n, and about the 1.9.1 L10n story (which is not there yet, not even for Firefox).
  I also fixed a typo in German security dialogs in time for Firefox 3.0.1.
• Various Discussions:
  Session (re)store, forks vs. shared code in mailnews UI files, Smart location Bar and SeaMonkey, version numbering, Thunderbird 3 planning, mozilla-central/1.9.1, etc.

The topic came up on the status meeting, and I already have though hard about this for a while now: Do we really need to release localized version of our first alpha? Now, the good thing with this would be that we could test the new (for SeaMonkey) "source L10n" infrastructure and get more testers if they can test in their own languages. The bad thing is that we made download manager and password manager reworks being blockers of the alpha just because we decided to not adopt the still-in-use old versions to this new L10n infrastructure and so they are broken in localized releases. An additional factory is that we will probably switch to hg and the Mozilla 1.9.1 platform before an alpha, and the platform itself has no L10n story for that version yet (it's being figured out currently but nobody knows when it will be in place).
Given that fact and shipping an alpha at all being more important than having localizations, I'm agreeing with the status meeting outcome of probably going for an en-US-only alpha and not making download and password managers hard blockers any more. This is a bit unfortunate, but at least we get nearer to showing off anything of SeaMonkey 2 to a wider public than nightly testers. We still are left with one blocker, and that is us needing all preference panels to be ported to the new prefwindow, the current double prefwindow stuff is nothing we want in an alpha. So, we are happy about any help we can get there, there's some not-too-hard UI-only work to be done there.
And sorry localizers - we'll still be working on getting full L10n support as soon as possible, even if not for this alpha!