Weekly Status Report, W24/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 24/2009 (June 8 - 14, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  Started working on the automated release harness for SeaMonkey, which needs a quite extensive list of new buildbotcustom factory abstractions, including some in the CC*Factory classes. I'm testing with my own Mercurial user for now while still waiting for seabld hg access.
  Followed through a Parallels update and upgraded our Mac VMs to 10.5.7, but that unfortunately didn't fix our network losses, application losses and VM crashes we're seeing esp. with Mac VMs there. Tickets are filed with Parallels, we hope to see a resolution soon.
• Release Process:
  Continued the SeaMonkey 1.1.17 release process towards a planned public release in sync with Thunderbird 2.0.0.22, containing a good number of security fixes compared to 1.1.16.
• Download Manager:
  The missing download icons on Mac are checked in now.
• Extension Updates:
  We're now sending the app version for extension update requests so that AMO can determine if the add-on is compatible with our version or not.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  search-rdf.dtd is now included in the build, so that the advanced search sidebar works correctly again.
• German L10n:
  Updated the tree for a few mailnews changes and the exclusion of PalmSync as well as a ChatZilla change and a mozilla-central change to about:plugins, but only after verifying that the "merged L10n" SeaMonkey builds worked even without those changes, displaying the missing strings in English.
• Various Discussions:
  Bugzilla improvements, NEW->UNCONFIRMED mass change, Thunderbird API refactorings, Firefox 3.5 going for RCs, etc.

Our friends in the Thunderbird project are making nice steps towards cleaner APIs for the mail and news back- and frontends (this week it was folder display and thread pane, earlier they already improved the folder pane itself), it would be nice if someone could help bringing those improvements to SeaMonkey, which would make it easier to work on other code improvements - something you, my dear reader, could help with?