Weekly Status Report, W30/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 30/2009 (July 20 - 26, 2009):

• Release Process:
  I spent quite some time the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release this week again, the good news is that it was about setting the finishing touches and making the release public on Tuesday (missing the moon landing anniversary by just a day). Builds for Windows, Linux and Mac in 17 languages as well as partial and complete updates (for US English, we didn't have any localized versions before) could be delivered right from the first minute and what I wrote up in the announcement seems to be reflected in some media coverage we get.
• Build System and Release Harness:
  The version bump problem I found in Beta 1 work got reviews and could land once I had time after the release was public. With that and the beta release coming off it, I could mark the release harness as fixed.
  Build with mozilla-central now requite wireless-tools on Linux, I fixed the x86_64 box by installing those. Also mainly for the mozilla-central trees, I installed Java 6 on the Windows machines, this also fixed a leak that only had happened on a single machine but introduced a known leak that is fixed on mozilla-central but not 1.9.1 yet.
  As a side note, I should have the SeaMonkey 1.1 build machines up and running again, I'm still investigating an issue with the Linux box and its X server.
• SeaMonkey Project Website:
  Landed the the reworked 2.0 Beta 1 download page with the locale matrix and the download button figuring out the fitting language as well as OS.
• Statistics on Dev Site:
  From time to time, I like to play with my SeaMonkey development website and get resources up there that I think are helpful for our project. Last weekend, I created more elaborate weekly bug and release radar statistics to get a better view of current work in historic perspective and to get a better overview for release planning.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  14 locales plus US English shipped as official builds in 2.0 Beta 1, two shipped as experimental/unofficial with a note that they didn't fully meet quality and formal requirements for official builds at this time, but I think both should be up to making it for Beta 2. Overall, this beta was a good experience in terms of L10n, and I hope we'll get more locales joining in for the second beta and the final release.
• German L10n:
  Synched up with geolocation and mailnews string changes, discussed de community IRC meetings with Topal.
• Various Discussions:
  Add-on blocklist, landing dlmgr search fix, tabmail, mozilla-central build problems, Gecko/platform 1.9.2 planning and SeaMonkey/Thunderbird, security updates for vulnerabilities disclosed at BlackHat, etc.

The SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release seems to go well so far. We have received reports of a few minor regressions, which we are working on, but almost all of the feedback is quite good. So far, we have over 13,000 tracked downloads for this beta and the numbers are growing (somewhat more slowly than at other times because of the holiday season). The media reports I saw are fairly OK, though the note comes through that we're not up to feature parity with Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3 on all accounts, which we know, but we also should be doing better there than SeaMonkey 1.1.x in comparison to Firefox 2.0 and Thunderbird 2.0, so we are on the right track.
Actually, there are only two major features we miss that we want to ship in SeaMonkey 2.0 that are not present in this beta yet, and that is tabbed mail and a reworked Mac theme. Both are being worked on right now, in their final touches and review phase, and hopefully landing soon. Other than that, all that's left is making the experience rounder and fixing some annoyances and bugs, everything else is topping on the cake.
SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 already works and feel so much better than 1.1.x in so many ways that it's really time for us to push for releasing as soon as we can, even if that means pushing some nice-to-have things to the next version. We don't have to be concerned about not doing everything in 2.0, as this version already more than warrants its major version jump. There will be a next release after it that can improve many more things, and the solid add-ons platform even makes 2.0 able to be improved a lot by itself.
I hope everyone of you will support and help us to get a great final as soon as reasonably possible for us!

As a side note, thanks to Matthias "matti" Versen for caring about out add-ons blocklist and trying it keep it up to date in the future!