Weekly Status Report, W49/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 49/2008 (December 1 - 7, 2008):

• Build System:
  I landed yet another build system sync patch and did a followup to the client.py branch switch so that it runs with python 2.6, which prohibits using a [default] section in any INI-format config file.
  My fixup to in-package directory names with "pretty" package names was landed in mozilla-central, but not 1.9.1 yet.
• Misc Development:
  The mailWidgets fork is completed now.
  The superfluous inclusion of global/skin is now gone from mozilla-central, I hope it will be approved for 1.9.1 soon as it makes grippies not appear on the new history window.
• Releases:
  I worked on both SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 and 1.1.14 this week, tagging and creating candidate builds for both. While the former is expected to be released in the next few days, the latter is targeted for December 16th.
  I also filed and partially fixed a few bugs related to those releases, for bumping version numbers, bug flags and keywords, bouncer additions, etc.
  For the alpha, I needed to figure out how to use the automatic update system (AUS) for releases the first time, and decided we will only ship complete updates this time, as setting up partial update generation is too much work manually - we'll have that with the automated release harness in future releases. The complete updates from 2.0 Alpha 1 to Alpha 2 are prepared and tested for all 3 major platforms though.
• Places History:
  As already posted here, I worked on the last iterations of my patch for switching SeaMonkey history to places, addressing a number of further review comments, and removing more non-history parts of the UI files I ported from Firefox (we're keeping separate UI for history and bookmarks, even if we might switch to using places for the bookmarks backend one time - which hasn't happened yet). Finally, I landed that patch on Sunday and enabled that new backend for everyone, including the new "awesome" location bar autocomplete algorithm and increased amounts of stored history.
  During development and after checkin, I filed a couple of followup bugs on cleanups, bugs, problems and further work. Oh, and I did a patch for removing the xpfe mork history, finally.
• L10n:
  I followed up on SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 and L10n, now 11 language packs are repackaged, roughly tested (i.e. they bring up localized and usable browser, navigator, add-ons and preferences windows) and will appear as experimental language packs for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2. Thanks to our localization community for providing the work to make this possible!
• German L10n:
  The de locale was kept up-to-date both for the Alpha 2 release as well as the following changes in strings, including the places landing.
• Various Discussions:
  1.9.1 branch switching, UI changes from 1.x to 2.0, refreshing debug/QA menus, toolbar customization, mailnews de-rdf, APNG throbber, Get All Messages, incubator repositories module, de L10n of Mozilla brochure and manifesto, etc.

It's great to see SeaMonkey finally using places as the history backend, meaning less of that strange, Mozilla-only "mork" database format and more of the widely used SQLite database format in the backend, usage of less barely maintained xpfe code and more well-maintained, shared toolkit code, and some great new features for the location bar's autocomplete search as well as the ability to store more history data with less memory usage and no decrease in performance. This code change needs some time of testing in the development builds and nightlies and probably some followup fixes and improvements before it can get make its way even into Alpha 3, but it's a good step forward towards SeaMonkey 2.
Before that, we're about to release Alpha 2 this upcoming week, which doesn't contain that code yet, but debuts finer-grained control over toolbar icons and text (only in the browser and the main mail windows, for now) as well as a feed reader in the mail component and numerous other changes, like the toolkit-based find as you type and a large list of Mozilla core improvements we share with the other Mozilla-based products, including Firefox 3.1 as the front-runner in the family.
This is really a good time for being a part of the SeaMonkey project.