Weekly Status Report, W37/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 37/2009 (September 7 - 13, 2009):

• Releases:
  Continued uploading contributed 1.1.18 builds.
  The big work item for this week was SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 though. As I need to play release driver, build engineer, marketing guy and some part of the QA lead, it took some time to get everything finished off, but I could push the beta public on Saturday. So far, everything looks fine and feedback from that release is already leading to patches being landed for 2.0 final.
• Build Machines:
  I had more discussions with Mozilla IT on how to solve the unsatisfactory situation we are in due to Parallels not delivering the stable virtualization of Mac machines we'd need, and they might get us a few minis set up. Going virtual would have been nice but unfortunately there is no good solution for this yet apparently.
  I also fought an instability of tests on Tiger, I guess it's time to make our testing on Mqac Leopard-only.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Beta 2 could go public with 17 official languages (including US English). I hope this number will even rise with RCs and final.
• German L10n:
  Unfortunately, there's a nasty typo in German SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 that breaks sending email to SMTP servers that need authentication. People only found that when testing the beta itself, but I found the cause and current nightlies as well as RCs next month are fixed, the German newsgroup has a fix circulating for those who dare to edit files inside a zipped de.jar file of their installation.
  I also updated the localization for a few changes made since we re-opened the tree for post-beta fixes.
• Various Discussions:
  Lightning support, EnigMail support, 2.0 approvals, quit dialogs, intermittent 1.1.18 NSS problems on Linux, QA community, Mozilla Camp Europe, Mozilla Weekly Project Meetings, etc.

I know this update is somewhat late again, I barely come to do the routine daily work right now. How does the saying go - so much to do, so little time? something like that.

In any case, we could release SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 on Saturday, and I hope it's getting out to our testers, unfortunately the Mozilla release guys who could moderate the post to the prerelease announcement list are all on vacation and the download counter has not been turned on again after being turned off for performance reasons during some recent Firefox release, we don't have any other statistics that could show us anything about the uptake of this beta, so feedback in the newsgroups etc. is the only way we know if people use and test this version. I already saw that some media has picked it up, so at least one channel seems to be working!

It's nice to see the new Mac theme in a screenshot in one of the press reports, and tabmail makes it possible to use to use current Lightning nightlies with the Beta 2 release and newer nightlies, even though there are still some glitches. We're working on fixing those problems as well so that SeaMonkey 2.0 should hopefully support Lightning 1.0 fully. Oh, and we're also working on getting our APIs beefed up enough that EnigMail should work again, by the way.