Weekly Status Report, W04/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2010 (January 25 - 31, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  I installed a newer gcc on the Linux machines and started using it for trunk builds. Additionally, I synched our mozconfig files for trunk much more to what Firefox is running on trunk as well.
  Because I might be a bit crazy and like to put our machines under more pressure than they should be under, I even tried to turn on one additional test suite on trunk to try and find bugs to fix.
  I also helped Armen from Mozilla release engineering to get his current L10n build work into a shape so that it works fine with SeaMonkey/Thunderbird builds as well.
  Last not least, I filed a bug on disappearing Windows slaves - seems like we've overused the space available on our Parallels server.
• Packaging:
  As we want to run packaged tests on Mac some time, we will need to turn on tests on normal builds there, but need to care that the test files don't end up in file we deliver to users. That and us probably being the only ones who haven't done it yet was enough motivation for me to finally look into merging our package manifests and use one preprocessed file for all (three!) main platforms. I got all the way to having the "browser" section complete, based on the Firefox manifest and our current Linux/Windows ones, now I just need to do the sections for mail and all the other stuff we don't nearly have in common with Firefox - and then get this sucker tested and reviewed!
• Support Emails:
  Even if I tell people that I'm not the person to contact for support, a number of emails about that topic end up in my mailbox nevertheless, some directly, some via seamonkey-council. I tend to move them into a folder and batch-handle all of them every few weeks - or rather months. This week, it was time to do such a pass again, and I sent about 70-80 replies to them (I try to leave nobody without an answer), even though most of those are just one sentence and a templated section to look at our community page to find better and more responsive soruce for support.
• Various Discussions:
  2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, geolocation service options, new machines, getting codesighs and leak test data on graphs server, KompoZer integration work, L10n dashboard and sign-off, future add-ons UI, etc.

A good part of this week did run into various discussions and more buildbot tweaks, things are moving forward positively from all I'm seeing - we just need to get some more real development done on trunk, even though that slowly starts to pick up now. Any help to make SeaMonkey 2.1 an even better suite than 2.0 is appreciated, of course!