Weekly Status Report, W31/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 31/2009 (July 27 - August 2, 2009):

• Build System and Release Harness:
  Continued investigating the issue with the "hoshi" box that does SeaMonkey 1.1. Linux builds.
• Planning and Feedback:
  I spent a good amount of time with both looking at feedback for 2.0 Beta 1, which look quite positive in principle, but includes a few reports of regressions and bugs that need attention, as well as planning for the second beta and even final. We discussed the latter at the SeaMonkey Status Meeting and decied to decouple the schedule from Thunderbird so that we're able to get the new generation out and can set a stamp on retiring the old one, which is really overdue.
  I also closely followed the planning for an upcoming security update for 1.8-based releases, which will include a SeaMonkey 1.1.18.
• German L10n:
  Some mailnews updates for keeping de sea20x green.
• Various Discussions:
  Windows linking issue, tabmail, new Mac theme, Gecko/platform planning, some XULRunner-based Mandelbrot fun, checkin comment rules, code style discussion, etc.

This Tuesday, Beta 1 has surpassed the ~18,500 downloads we had for Alpha 1 - just that the first alpha had two months of lifetime as the newest development release to gather that amount, while the first beta had two weeks to get up to the same number.

Also, we get repeated reports of Beta 1 working at least as stable as 1.1.x for people, most of the problems people have seem to be related to migration of profiles or regressions we are working on (or even have already fixed in current nightlies). All in all, things seem to go well with the first beta.

As for the second beta, the code freeze for it will also mean feature freeze for the whole 2.0 series, so we need to get the two large missing features - the new Mac theme and tabbed mail - in before that freeze to have them in this series. Things are moving for both though, each of them got significantly nearer to checkin readiness lately, tabmail has been tested for a number of interesting use cases and got its first full pass of code review comments, the Mac theme has UI review now. I'm looking forward to seeing everything wrap up before the targeted freeze on September 1.