Weekly Status Report, W04/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2009 (January 19 - 25, 2009):

• Build System:
  GLOBAL_DEPS are now working on comm-central, which also means that we rebuild code on changes to autoconf.mk and config.mk - we're too eager to rebuild right now on both Mozilla and comm-central, but we have an idea how to solve that.
  Once again, I did a number of build system ports to comm-central, split into a general and L10n Makefile part. Those are only ports for stuff in 1.9.1, I'll take a look at additional things in mozilla-central once we branch comm-central.
  Based on this, I also tried to work on easier default profile localization, there are a few obstacles in that though and the patch needs more work.
• Download Manager UI:
  Another new patch for the new download manager UI is here, it should be pretty final for this iteration, we now need to wait on the backend to see something actually work. Meanwhile, some followup bugs were filed on improvements to make once the initial UI has landed.
• Automated tests:
  Due to a new leak that had been uncovered by our XUL ID test, I tried porting this test to Firefox - even though our leak turned out to be SeaMonkey-specific, this test could help Firefox to not regress it main window, and even to improve their preferences window, as it's shown up as leaking in that test (and it has some string bundle IDs duplicated).
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Galician and Japanese have been added to the supported SeaMonkey languages, now we're trying to build 21 languages for SeaMonkey trunk daily and hope to ship all those and more for 2.0 final.
• German L10n:
  SeaMonkey strings was kept up-to-date with comm-central trunk most of the time.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, SeaMonkey vision, Lightning, toolbar customization, langpacks and release automation, bmo reorg part 2, newsgroup spam, etc.

While I'm still trying to get used to all the new eye-candy I'm working with now, I see more and more important pieces of SeaMonkey 2 come together - now even Windows/Linux browser toolbar customization has landed on trunk! Some things like history / location bar improvements and the better password management backend also have already landed for Alpha 3, others like session restore, feed preview, download manager improvements, OS X browser toolbar customization and tabbed mail are being worked on and we also hope to be able to ship those in that last alpha. There will be regressions and rough edges, that's why it's still an alpha, but we're trying to push all those features into that one so that we get them tested and have some room for finishing them up and smoothing the experience for beta before putting on the finishing touches to go for a final release later on. The plans for this seem to hold up well for now.