Weekly Status Report, W44/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 44/2008 (October 27 - November 2, 2008):

• Build System:
  Comm-central needed a small patch to build with the spidermonkey build changes, but we got a forward warning so we were prepared we needed to do something - thanks Jim!
  A longstanding issue - the typeaheadfind story - made a public appearance when more backend improvement work broke it again and we decided to finally do something more serious about that unmaintained blob and cut it out - a replacement will be found in time for 2.0, but we don't know yet what exactly it will be.
• Misc Hacking:
  I could correct the geolocation string IDs for better label-accesskey association, which is good and bad news for localizers: tools better detect where the accesskeys belong to, but people who already localized the strings need to change the IDs as well accordingly.
  A file for update/installer improvements has been added, it only will fully be used once Frank concludes his work on installer improvements.
• Future Visions:
  I started a thread on long-term SeaMonkey project goals, a vision for the future of our project and while a lots of talk about side topics arose out of that in typical newsgroup fashion, a few good ideas in a vision direction also came up. We'll continue collecting ideas on that thread for a bit and then turn to try and consolidate to a draft in the Council, which we'll probably put up for comments and feedback again, we'll see how close to making it final we'll be then.
• SeaMonkey Releases:
  The release process for the next security update, SeaMonkey 1.1.13, has been started, targeting a November 12 release, please help testing the candidate builds!
• German L10n:
  I tried to keep up with en-US changes but introduced a typo that is now followed by an interesting discussion by itself about how to word some of those strings.
• Various Discussions:
  Fishcam, test failures, Tiger build problems, places and prefs, <video> context menu, EarlyBlue and LCARStrek themes, download manager, L10n dashboards, Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8.1 EOL plans, etc.

At MozCamp Europe in Barcelona I had some interesting talk with a number of people, including Ian Neal (IanN), about SeaMonkey badly needing a feed reader and probably just moving most of what Thunderbird has to a shared place and porting the UI integration to mailnews being a good idea. The opinion most people seemed to agree with was that using the same code and get it to work would be better than waiting for improvements we'd like to see in that code, as once it works in both apps, we are both interested in getting those improvements into it incrementally.
What I didn't expect but much appreciated was that Ian picked up the bug and created a patch for doing this work of moving code that can be shared and integrating it with SeaMonkey! With this, we probably will have feed reading support in SeaMonkey mailnews soon, even though we will not have feed detection in the browser linked to it just yet - that will be happening (probably with an intermediate preview and reader selection page) as a next step though. Thanks a lot to Ian for this work!