Weekly Status Report, W25/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 25/2009 (June 15 - 21, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build/Release Harness:
  After lots and lots of hours spent testing and fixing things, I could get the automated release harness for SeaMonkey to actually work, producing a bogus test-only "2.0a4" from current code, the resulting patches for buildbotcustom factory abstraction, dealing with brand names in update tools, DMG unpackaging in build and same in tools are all awaiting reviews.
  As a followup, I added a few files to be removed on update so that resulting complete or partial updates (yes, we can do the latter now for releases) end up as clean as they should be.
  I also updated the patch for repack factory abstraction for some bitrot, attached a patch for a small unit test packaging followup and made package-compare run in comm-central builds.
• 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.
• Misc Work:
  Did some changes in how my SeaMonkey development website retrieves and stores data: Weekly Bugzilla stats are now requested more efficiently using the microsummary ctype instead of full lists to retrieve the count and the results are kept in a DB, once I have more data and time, I'll make more than 3 weeks available on a separate page. Also, SeaMonkey 1.x update notification ping stats are now stored in a DB on the server, still need to write a report on those.
  I also fixed the Thunderbird and SeaMonkey nightly file paths on www.m.o/developer.
• Various Discussions:
  DEL and other keys in download manager, OpenWebCamp Vienna, Bugzilla improvements, NEW->UNCONFIRMED mass change, etc.

With all the work I did put into that in the last weeks, I hope we will be able to actually ship the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release off the automated harness which can produce L10n builds as well as partial updates, both of which we didn't have previously. Additionally, using that buildbot-based mechanism makes it much less manual work to get the release done. We still need to do a bit of discussion if we can live with using so-called "pretty" file names for the release (e.g. "SeaMonkey Setup 2.0 Beta 1.exe" instead of "seamonkey-2.0b1.en-US.installer.exe") and we also have no signing infrastructure for Windows builds, but we can fake it by copying unsigned builds to the final place and continue to ship unsigned releases as we did up to now.

Next to that, I'm realizing that a few areas of our project are pretty dormant and I can't find time myself to move them much forward myself. this especially concerns QA and marketing. We really would need people to help making progress there - if you can support us in any of them, please contact me!