Weekly Status Report, W18/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 18/2010 (May 3 - 9, 2010):

• Releases:
  I got 2.0.5 builds going (candidates are up for testing) and pushed them to the beta channel after some testing. Actual release might get delayed due to 3.6.4, with the same security fixes but even a large feature, is being delayed as well.
  For that release, I also went through L10n signoffs and after some review could add en-GB and zh-CN (Simplified Chinese) to our shipped locales - thanks to those L10n teams to provide this cool work!
  Also, I tried to get things lined up for cutting 2.1 Alpha 1, which took a while because of some blocker bugs needing to get out of the way (build breakage prohibiting Windows test runs, MDN breakage, Modern toolbar menubutton breakage). Meanwhile, into this week, it looks like we finally have what we need for this first Alpha.
  To support those releases and get them on track, I created preliminary release notes and filed a number of bugs tracking various stuff that needs to happen for the releases.
• Build:
  We had a very interesting build problem I looked into this week, which happened when the debug builds on Windows wanted to install tests for the content module. The error message of "nsinstall.exe: bad file number" was quite unhelpful, but when I investigated by taking one of our build slaves off the build bool and attacking it manually, I found out we actually seemed to be hitting a length limitation in the command line of the Windows build environment. We had been hitting this on those builds first (and not on other SeaMonkey or even on Firefox builds) as paths in that configuration are slightly longer than elsewhere. Installing 321 test files in one command line could make it grow even over 33,000 characters, and somewhere in that range we did hit a wall (smells so much like 32,767 but we seemed to get somewhat over that - maybe it's just argument string length or such).
  In the end, I made a patch for splitting that list of tests into two parts, the patch was accepted into mozilla-central and the problem is gone now.
• Places:
  The places bookmarks patch set has been on the backburner this week, but I followed as de-XBL of toolbars and menus landed for Firefox, will adopt this as soon as I come around to.
• Various Discussions:
  Account Manager, Summit, module owners, tree/network issues, etc.

I sent a lot of this week not only recovering from a cold but also at a local FOSS conference called "Linuxwochen" in Vienna. Lots of conversations there were pretty interesting, including those on getting an open geolocation database service going and thinking about organizing open source meetings together with the OpenOffic.org guys - oh, and probably even the one with the Microsoft guy who presented their "surface" desk and who didn't see why I disliked that it wasn't using an open software stack. The FSFE team congratulated me to that discussion the day after...
My talk on "Mozilla is more than Firefox" was quite well-received, people seemed to be particularly interested in mobile, Weave and Labs, and video, and someone also told me that "Mozilla should advertise the philosophy more". Also, the Mozilla swag I did get some time ago is now almost fully in the hands of the people.

Another fruitful conference experience with a lot of interesting chat with cool people - now let's put an interesting first 2.1 alpha into the hands of another set of cool people!