Weekly Status Report, W01/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 01/2010 (January 4 - 10, 2010):

• Releases:
  I prepared a 2.0.2 update this week, containing a very small set of fixes over 2.0.1, most importantly a fix for freezes in composing emails on Windows when the OE Contacts address book is present.
  Along with that short-cycled update, the previously planned 2.0.2 release scheduled for early February was renamed to 2.0.3.
  Unfortunately, the automated release process didn't perform completely without problems this time, I ran into a timeout with our mini as well as some bustage from a recent infrastructure update and did a patch for the latter.
  In the end, I got candidate builds and beta channel updates out on Tuesday evening, and could prepare all website changes by Sunday for a Monday release.
• Add-Ons:
  We're trying to encourage add-on authors to make their work compatible with SeaMonkey 2.0. Most of the work for that is being done on our side by Philip Chee, e.g. for sending out messages.
  We also would like to get an add-ons compatibility center set up on AMO though, and I prepared "SeaMonkey 2.0" wordmark images for that.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  After the 2.0 release, we have been pointed to a license problem with packaging dictionaries into language packs, which we worked around in the recent releases, but for the future (beginning with 2.0.3), we're not shipping dictionaries in langpacks to resolve this. We now are only packaging the chrome localization, perfectly matching what Firefox does. This also makes it easier to merge more of the build processes across Mozilla applications in the future.
  If you are using language packs and want the matching dictionary installed in the future, fetch it from AMO - which makes it even available if you switch between languages.
  The fully localized builds are not affected and still contain the matching dictionary (if available under the MPL from Mozilla repositories), by the way.
• Various Discussions:
  L10n build infrastructure, close button on tabs, build system porting, AIX port, extension dependencies, future of theme and extension systems, external linkage for mailnews, etc.

With my dad's birthday in the middle of the week, I once again spent most of the week at home with my parents and didn't get around to a whole lot of work, but still tried to start picking up the pace at least somewhat - with a priority on shipping the mail compose freeze fix to Windows users in the 2.0.2 update.
As of right now, I'm back to a normal working schedule, and starting to think more and more about where to go with 2.1, both in terms of features and code work as well as timing. Unfortunately, I don't see the Firefox "Lorentz" story finalized as of now, but timing of the next Gecko/platform releases plays a critical role in our own release planning. I hope to see some light shed on those matters soon.