Weekly Status Report, W37/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 37/2008 (September 8 - 14, 2008):

• Automated Test Machines:
  I spent quite a bit of time this week tracking down the remaining problem on our automated SeaMonkey test machines. First I made leak thresholds work with a workaround on those test machines, so the boxes can go green even though they report leaks. We should still fix those, but it's more important to see new issues coming up by making the boxes go from green to orange or red.
  With that done, we saw a browser test fail, which actually needed a different test to be fixed to correctly clean up its listeners, but we went green on Linux and Windows except for a few intermittent failues that probably still require closer looks.
  On Mac, we had two unit test failure though, and I went into a few-hour-long session with Boris Zbarsky to debug one of those, only to find out that NSPR reported to us that machine has zero physical memory, even if I could swear it had some. This was worked around for the moment by assuming we have 32MB when NSPR reports 0, so that we create a memory cache with minimum size and get working tests.
  I also tried to get forward the other remaining Mac failure by trying to get us to exclude this test on OS X 10.4 only as we know it fails there, but those things are not easy with our TUnit test suite and xpcshell tests right now.
• Build Machines:
  The generic stage upload buildstep for Mozilla buildbots now can upload L10n update files and language packs now, so we can fully use it for upload L10n builds to Mozilla's FTP server.
  Symbol steps have been put before packaging to make OSX symbols work for SeaMonkey as well - thanks to Ben Hearsum for finding out about this and posting about it on planet (where I found out about that).
• Code Cleanup:
  The last patches for killing xpfe-style chrome versions are landed now, we finally could get rid of that old cruft.
  Additionally, the mork-based toolkit history has been removed now, the only remaining history implementations in the tree is the outdated xpfe mork history still used by SeaMonkey and the current places-based history in toolkit. Switching SeaMonkey to this is a wanted-seamonkey2+ bug but someone needs to look into making the history window and sidebar work with it.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.x Releases:
  The release process for SeaMonkey 1.1.12 is continuing, testing on the candidate builds looks good and those builds will probably be released, but Firefox people saw a few regressions with the synchronized FF 3.0.2 release and needed to push all those synchronized releases further out, which also affects us due to security advisories being published at the same time for all of those. The plan calls for the end of this week or start of next week for the actual release.
• SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 1:
  As the SeaMonkey-specific code froze for Alpha this week, I was busy caring that people get in their patches for blockers, triaging the remaining blocker nominations and approval requests after the freeze.
  In the Status meeting this week, we decided that we'll call the next milestone Alpha 2 for now, so I cared we get bugzilla flags for this and also for SeaMonkey 2 "wanted" bugs. The general feeling is also that we will actually need it the milestone to be an actual Alpha, though we could still go and change it to a Beta if that would feel more fitting - that's a decision to make when we get nearer to it though, for now the nightlies will go 2.0a2pre once Alpha 1 gets cut.
• SeaMonkey L10n Builds:
  Reporting our L10n builds on Mozilla-l10n-* tinderbox waterfall pages shows somewhat strange errors now, I need to further investigate that, but builds themselves are generated correctly.
  And please welcome Hungarian as the newest language being built for SeaMonkey trunk!
• German L10n:
  German SeaMonkey L10nsaw a few more updates for the surge of prefpanels being converted for the SeaMonkey Alpha freeze.
• Various Discussions:
  Leak sources, toolbar customization, L10n dashboard, Alpha 1 release notes, EU MozCamp, www.mozilla.org archiving and revewing, etc.

As I mentioned last week, SeaMonkey-specific code is frozen for Alpha 1 now, and meanwhile most of our remaining blockers have landed, the remaining blocker in SeaMonkey-specific code is removing the legacy prefwindow now that all panels have been migrated to the new window - huge thanks for everyone involved for completing this huge task!
Unfortunately, we have two core regressions we're also tracking as blocking our Alpha 1 release, one regrading Ctrl+Home/End keys in editor, another being wrong selection colors in plain text, I hope we'll see fixes for those landing soon, so we can cut and ship this long-awaited Alpha to more public testing.