Weekly Status Report, W02/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 02/2009 (January 5 - 11, 2009):

• Places History:
  Making tests even more robust against different default prefs as well as adding UI prefs for places have landed now, so we now have graphical preferences that determine if we match website titles as well or just URLs, where in the title/URL we find matches - and even the minimum of days to save history for.
• Misc Development Work:
  When I investigated how well the Lightning calendar extension will work with SeaMonkey once tabbed mail lands, I saw the error console filled with messages related to a status bar progress difference we had compared to Thunderbird, Firefox and Sunbird - for which I whipped up a patch, got it reviewed and checked in. With this, showing the status bar progress indicator works the same way in all our 1.9.1-based applications now - and Lighting doesn't come up with any error any more when the tabbed mail patch is used with SeaMonkey (there are still missing items in the UI due to unsuccessful overlays, but they don't result in errors).
  I also filed a bug and patch on a recently introduced automated test problem with SeaMonkey - it doesn't make much sense to port failure workaround hacks for specific failures to tests about something different.
  While I was looking into tests, I created a patch for the --enable-static --enable-tests compile failure that has been seen in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey for some time - even though I saw we have certain problems with actually executing tests in that configuration in any case.
  In addition to that, I spent a number of hours on the weekend on improving the throbber animation, which involved extracting an swf movie from a larger swf with the original throbber work from our logo designer, then extracting SVGs for all its frames from that swf, batch-editing those SVGs, then writing up a GIMP batch script for converting the SVG frames to alpha-transparent PNGs, and finally assembling those into APNG images. Not to mention the mass of documentation I read to get this done and the search for tools and testing them to finally find some that could do what I wanted. I'll probably do another blog post on that work soon.
• Organizational Tasks:
  When our website failed, I filed a bug and contacted Mozilla server admins, who recogized what had happened and fixed the problem.
  Something very similar needed to be done for a nightly symbol upload failure.
  As hgweb has been configured meanwhile to not need ugly "index.cgi/" chunks in the URLs, I could remove those from a number of places in our buildbot configs.
  Finally, I also found the time to write up a proposal for the future vision of the SeaMonkey project based on the comments on the threads I started in newsgroups about that. I mailed this proposal to the SeaMonkey Council and some additional core developers, and we hope to have at least a signed-off official draft very soon. Watch this blog and the SeaMonkey newsgroups for more news about that.
• Download Manager UI:
  I continued work on the new download manager UI, mainly by addressing the first batches of review comments and fixing a few bugs. We also figured out a few things to work on in followup bugs once this UI rewrite has landed - and all that before anyone has even tested that work in SeaMonkey itself.
• German L10n:
  Once again, German SeaMonkey strings were kept current, additionally, a de help update was landed.
• Various Discussions:
  Login manager, tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, etc.

FOSDEM is coming around in a few weeks once again, once again with a Mozilla presence (this time including a main-track opening keynote by Mozilla's Mark Surman!) and I also will be attending yet again. I hope I'll meet a good number of Mozilla and even SeaMonkey folks there, as well as people from other projects (I'm esp. interested in maemo, openSUSE and KDE - depending on what/who is present there). My plans include a talk about "SeaMonkey 2 and the vision beyond", which will show off a bit of a demo of where SeaMonkey 2 is headed (probably with a heavily patched build unless all the great stuff actually lands before then) and present the (draft of the) new long-term vision of the SeaMonkey project. Hopefully this will be able to give the crowd there some new insights, as this is what I also want to take with me from this event when it comes to other projects.

I'm looking forward to this classic experience once again - if you have the time it's really worth traveling there for a weekend with a mindbogglingly big number of geeks in one single place (and also interesting insights into what's going on in the free and open source software world)!