Weekly Status Report, W09/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 09/2010 (March 1 - 7, 2010):

• Releases:
  I built candidate builds for the last ever SeaMonkey 1.x release. The announcement we'll have in the middle of March will be the end of life (EOL) of the 1.1.x series, actually, but we'll offer SeaMonkey 1.1.19 as an update for a few known security problems - but not all of them. Only SeaMonkey 2.0.x is kept completely secure, and only that series will be maintained and get updates from now on.
• Build Infrastructure And Automated Tests:
  My small fix for Windows leak stats could land on buildbotcustom and so SeaMonkey could update to the most recent revision and use it completely without local patches again.
• Places:
  Next to my recent work on porting places history performance fixes and places bookmarks, I did the SeaMonkey part of an interface change that cleans up code a bit and landed twice on mozilla-central this week but has been backed out again both of those times. If it lands again, we have a patch ready so that SeaMonkey trunk doesn't break and can use that work right away.
  On bookmarks front, I did get to sort out some command and key definitions - and I started a thread on m.d.a.seamonkey to find out what style the management window should follow. Looks like the split view with ideally a possibility to tree-like expand folders in the main area seems to be what people there tend to. If you have any arguments to bring on that topic, please do there.
• Services.jsm:
  As the module gained support for a few more services, I updated my patch for starting to use it in SeaMonkey and also included some more line breaking improvements.
• Various Discussions:
  Packaging fixes to fix test bustage, emptyText->placeholder switch, build system reviews, places bookmarks FUD, more improvements for "human-readable" pushlog feeds, Mozilla communication channels, commit access policy, mozilla.org planning, "open to choice" and missing choice at the "EU ballot", etc.

The SeaMonkey project is about to turn 5 years old! On March 10, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation posted a transition plan to surrender development, project and release management for the long-lived application suite to the community and therefore paved the road for our project to emerge. On July 2, we announced that our newly formed project would go under the "SeaMonkey" name, on September 15, we released our first Alpha under that brand, on December 2, we announced our new logo, and January 30, 2006, marked the SeaMonkey 1.0 release. While we started development of a toolkit-based really new version shortly after that, we did a 1.1 with only smaller improvements on top of 1.0 a year later. The brand new development version took a quite long time to be ready and stable, but was delivered to the public on October 27, 2009, as the SeaMonkey 2.0 release. Now, we're working on more to come while we're finally stopping support on the old xpfe-based suite code we inherited 5 years ago and which has served as a good base for getting this project set up, thriving on its own and work with more modern code in the end.
I'll do a dedicated blog post about this topic in the next days - probably on the SeaMonkey blog. Let's celebrate the first 5 years of this project and work on many more to come!