Weekly Status Report, W06/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 06/2010 (February 8 - 14, 2010):

• Releases:
  SeaMonkey 2.0.3 preparation moved along with copying builds to the right locations, creating checksums, etc.
  We haven't heard of anything bad from beta-testing this release, so we are on course for a release on Tuesday, February 16.
• Build Infrastructure:
  This week it was mostly maintenance of the build pools, but it looks like data on graphs server and new Mac machines are coming near to getting finished now, esp. the latter should give us a good boost in what our pools can do (moving Macs from VMs to real machines frees up some space for Linux and possibly even a Windows machine, which we can put up then).
• Download Progress Windows:
  I put a number of additional hours of work into improving progress windows, but finally threw everything away after I encountered just too much stop energy. I felt an obligation to finish the job on those progress windows after I started it and saved their lives in the needed rewrite for 2.0 when the old implementation wouldn't work with the new download manager backend and we needed a new one. After being cursed, damned and nitpicked up to a point where it not only was no fun any more but also was starting to really depress me, I decided that someone else should care about it.
  I had done some work on a further progress window bug but also unassigned that from myself following that decision as I have wasted all my potential to deal with stop energy regarding that part of the application.
• Build System, Packaging:
  I verified or marked two more bugs as fixed that have been resolved by my package manifests merging. Good to see that this went well.
  As a followup, the OS/2 people are getting the manifest for SeaMonkey to work as well, I had some discussions about review and improvements for their patch in the bug.
• Various Discussions:
  Out-of-process-plugins for SeaMonkey, 2.1 planning discussions, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, KompoZer integration work, official listing for comm-central build system module, EOL for Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" on 1.9.3, (not) branching comm-1.9.2, automatic delivery of SeaMonkey statistics from Mozilla Metrics, etc.

As told above, progress windows have been a quite disappointing story for me, putting in many, many hours of work for saving a feature in SeaMonkey that nobody else still has and getting almost nothing but stop energy in return. I've been thinking about writing a "how to lose contributors" guide as a blog post, as right in that work we nicely did sum up a number of good mistakes to make if you want to get rid of people who are willing to help. Of course, it won't drive me away from the project as a whole and I can take quite some beating from some time, but in the end, some minor stuff was enough to drive me over the top and throw the towel on that single part of the app. And guides for "how to make things wrong" always make a better reading than advice for how to do it correctly, esp. as there is no single correct way, but a number of wrong ones.
So, keep reading, I probably will write that one up soon here on this blog!