Weekly Status Report, W12/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 12/2009 (March 16 - 22, 2009):

• Release Management:
  Actually released SeaMonkey 1.1.15 on Wednesday, followed by ongoing uploads of contributed builds for various platforms and languages.
• Download Manager:
  I've done some more work on creating full progress dialogs as well as some preliminary work on porting UI tests from toolkit as well as finding out which toolkit tests pass with our patches (including UI) applied. one test could be fixed easily, others will need to enable to toolkit UI to succeed on SeaMonkey (we'll add a hidden pref to do that).
• Automated tests:
  First, I added a project for automated test coverage in SeaMonkey to the Google Summer of Code proposals page.
  Second, when I read about a test moving to browser/ as it tests stuff specific to the browser window but noticed that it works fine in SeaMonkey, I decided we shouldn't lose coverage of that item. Just adding one single small test felt to be too easy though, so I looked into the move target directory for more tests to port over to SeaMonkey. As those are testing application-specific things, a good number of them needed adoption and I also uncovered some issues on our side in addition to more features to port from Firefox to SeaMonkey. I ended up with good sets of plain mochitests as well as browser-chrome tests to add, though, and hope to increase our test coverage soon due to that.
  Further, I found out we weren't respecting TEST_PATH in "make mochitest-browser-chrome" and, with the right pointer from gavin, ported the necessary patch for this to comm-central. I also filed a bug on no automated run with TEST_PATH in chrome mochitests, which seems to be a general test framework issue.
  And last not least, I did another iteration of the idcheck test for Firefox and gavin's review comments now need input from Karsten, who originally wrote this test.
• Build System:
  When writing up one of my talks for MAOW Berlin, I discovered that NO_JAR_AUTO_REG is obsolete but still present in comm-central and remove occurrences in places that surely don't support xpfe chrome registry any more (that flag was only used there).
  More review and discussion on the patch for pulling venkman from hg via client.py, up to this finally being ready for checkin.
• MAOW Berlin:
  Wrote up initial versions of my build system and SeaMonkey 2 extension talks (both in German) for the upcoming MAOW Berlin. If you understand German, I'm happy about feedback on both of those!
• German L10n:
  More keeping up-to-date with current SeaMonkey and 1.9.1 toolkit development to keep the de builds green.
• Various Discussions:
  New build machines, www.mozilla.org redesign proposals, HTML mail composing, Modern theme updates, mailnews migration with non-matching directory prefs, mailnews and external linkage, build symbol collection on Linux, in-code and MDC documentation relationships, JS performance and debugging, etc.

I had interesting experiences in finding bugs this week: On hand by porting tests from Firefox and finding out what problem they catch in SeaMonkey, on the other hand by writing up slides for a talk and tripping over obsolete definitions in our code. On both sides, a number of things were easy to fix once I knew them, some still needed to be worked around and be addressed in more detail later.
I also found that there a lot of room for students and code newcomers to work on in the SeaMonkey area - starting with increasing test coverage for existing code, via porting features from Firefox up to getting extensions like Weave to work with SeaMonkey. If you're interested the Google Summer of Code proposals may even enable you to get a T-shirt for that work (and less importantly, also some payment)!

And last not least, I'm looking forward to MAOW Berlin next weekend with a lot of firsts for me: the first stay in "Eastern Germany" and Berlin, the first time talking about Mozilla Mozilla stuff in German, and the first time of holding talks about the build system and extension porting. I'm sure this will all be exciting - and a lot of fun!