Weekly Status Report, W19/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 19/2009 (May 4 - 10, 2009):

• Download Manager:
  The patch for making toolkit UI tests not fail with our new UI has now landed, and so has a first build system part of the backend work so that a correct rebuild will be triggered when we change app-config.mk with the main switch.
• Build System:
  A patch to make version changes apply to the Windows .exe automatically could also go into mozilla-central this week, I hope to get it into 1.9.1 so it actually helps the SeaMonkey release process.
• Geolocation:
  My geolocation patch has review now, but we need to seek permission from Google to actually use their service by adding that URL to our default prefs, and they don't have official policies up for that as it is a new service. I'm in talk with them and hope we find a solution soon enough to be able to ship final, possibly even beta with it.
• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  The vast amount of time this week ran into the new SeaMonkey build machines. I did set up all the slaves and got them to a build configuaration that does most of what we need, even though a few bugs are left and l10n repackaging isn't on yet (needs more work).
  With having that to test, I could do an actual patch for mozilla dir abstraction in buildbot factories and for adding comm-central build classes to the shared buildbotcustom repo.
  There was a lot of fallout in bugs I filed during that work a some patches attached for the buildbotcustom stuff, also some more requests to IT.
  The plan is now to suck the suck the "old" Windows and Linux VMs into the generic slave pools of the new configuration and replace the old Tiger Macs with additional Leopard VMs and make the new buildbot master drive both trunk and branch with those pools then.
  We still have some distance to go with that, but things start to look quite good for the future of the SeaMonkey build infrastructure now. Thanks to everyone involved to make this possible.
• German L10n:
  Updates for string changes in mailnews so that German goes green again.
• Various Discussions:
  Error console, xpcshell-tests target and test directories, multi-process plans for platform, test reporting on tinderbox, mozilla.org planning, redundant master password prompts, cleaning up personal bugmail folders, polish bugs, etc.

The bug for them was filed half a year ago and it took some poking of people and some time, but the great thing has happened and we now have 14 virtual machines for building SeaMonkey instead of the 6 we had up to now, and we get to have our all-virtual Macs running on Leopard instead of the physical Tiger machines that are being obsoleted with the new configuration going into production. We also have the ability of all machines for one platform being able to run any cycles, so that we don't end up with build machines being idle all the time and unit tests not getting run enough or branch machines being idle and trunk being clogged (once we have both trunk and branch running, which is the primary purpose of all this). And we even will be able to run automated release building off those machines - once I have fully configured and tested that. And we will be sharing a lot more of the custom buildbot class code with Thunderbird and even Firefox so we all can profit from each other's work.
It has been long in coming and there's still some work left to do, but this is really great and should help us immensely.

Once again, thanks to everyone involved, from Community Giving via IT to Build & Release and others who care and help!