Weekly Status Report, W20/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 20/2010 (May 17 - 23, 2010):

• Releases:
  For SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 1, I did all I could to get what we could deliver in terms on release notes, wrote up an announcement, and finally got everything pushed live in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.
  SeaMonkey 2.0.5 release notes should be finished, so everything's ready for a release in sync with the new Firefoxes on June 1.
• Build Infrastructure:
  As the large buildbot upgrade to 0.8 still needs to wait for a few issues to be fixed (Mozilla release engineering folks are testing it), I tried to improve the situation of master load problems by updating buildbot slaves to support log buffering, which should have helped somewhat at least.
• Build:
  My patch for startup crashes on updates has now also landed on branch, which should help esp. for downgrading actions in the future.
• Places:
  The places history speedup review moved forward and I attached new patches addressing comments. I hope this will be able to land soon. I also filed a bug and patch on fixing some of those issues on the Firefox side as well.
  I tried to find out when the places transaction changes on the Firefox side might land, as I'd like those and the history patch above to be done for my next places bookmarks patch set and try builds, but unfortunately, Mano isn't reachable right now.
• View Source:
  I've been bothering me for some time that SeaMonkey is using both toolkit's view source in some places, and it's own in others, when both are almost the same. When a blog post on its importance reminded me, I decided to look into using toolkit's view source consistently and overlaying our own features on it. I came up with a patch, though some toolkit fixes were needed to make this smoother. My patch is adding roughly 260 code lines but removing about 1650, so it's a clear net win in terms of code size, functionality is nearly unchanged, and all view source windows are consistent after the patch.
• Various Discussions:
  New add-ons manager, no Summit and my role in Mozilla, WebM and open video, OpenSearch, Ratty's commit access, facebook's plans to take over the Internet, gren/orange/tree-open stats, Sync brand confusion, Win64, etc.

As I found my role and the role of SeaMonkey questioned in the light of where the web and Mozilla are going, with large, often monolithic structures and companies casting their shadows and the suite, myself or possibly even the open web itself having a stain of being old-school, backwards, and conservative, I felt I needed to do something about it.
First, I decided to not keep so many things to myself but to blog more. And second, and even more, I once again became inspired by that agenda behind Mozilla, and decided to write up an open call to make a difference, pointing out why I think that Mozilla has unique potential and why we should beat the drum for our idea of the Internet.

I hope many people join and make a difference where they live, so in the end the open web and people's freedom win.

This Internet shall have a new birth of freedom - and that network of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.