Weekly Status Report, W21/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 21/2010 (May 24 - 30, 2010):

• Releases:
  Still waiting on new Firefox updates to be so we can do a sync release of SeaMonkey 2.0.5 as well.
• Build Infrastructure:
  Watched the trees for intermittent failures and starred a number of them. We still have 2-3 Windows slave losses per day, but it's much better than before the slave updates for log buffering.
• View Source:
  My patches for both using toolkit's view source consistently the toolkit fixes have been reviewed and landed, we now have consistent and all suite-style view source windows.
• Add-ons:
  I've done a real lot of add-ons-related work this week, starting with bumping the maximum SeaMonkey version to 2.1a1 for Sync and Account Manager.
  While we are on sync, Google Summer of Code has taken off and Harini has posted a first result of her work in the bug to make tab sync work for SeaMonkey. Going through the reviews should make her more acquainted with the code style customs around here and set up the stage for the work on a mailnews metadata engine later this summer.
  The rest of my work in that area this week had been triggered by some recent discussions including creative thoughts on the future but also other topics causing some frustration that I had decided to escape by putting in some work and generating some sense of success. I came to the conclusion of converting some long-going thoughts of mine into concrete action and create a new Data Manager targeted for inclusion into SeaMonkey 2.1, if all goes well.
  While I was to create this as a new add-on first, to enable rapid development, get better testing and make it even available for Firefox, I realized that making my long-standing Mandelbrot XULRunner application available as an add-on would make it easier for people to download and test it, which is still quite clumsy for XULRunner applications.
  That in the end, resulted in adding two new add-ons to addons.mozilla.org, namely KaiRo.at Mandelbrot and Data Manager.
• Places:
  After I updated the Firefox fixup patch, Mano had time to review it and I could check it in. That also meant that the last question on the places history speedup patch was answered, a review could be completed and I checked that in as well.
  With that, the major prerequisite for places bookmarks is right there in the trunk tree! Following that, I created a new set of patches and yet another round of try builds that also should fix all the bugs reported to me so far with the previous ones. I hope we'll be able to get actual reviews of those patches soon.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Related to L10n at least is the topic of making "site" vs. "web site" vs. "website" usage consistent, and the "official" word on that seems now to be that "website" is the official choice for anything in that realm that can be said to be "on the web". Because of that, I created a patch to convert almost all of SeaMonkey to use "website" where "web site" or "site" had been used to talk about websites.
• German L10n:
  While thinking about how we could get more knowledge of what Mozilla work is happening in German-speaking countries ("DACH" area and more) and who are the people in that area, I realized that a German-language Mozilla planet would be a good idea and filed a bug for it.
• Various Discussions:
  My role in Mozilla, WebM and open video, Ratty's commit access (congrats!), "I believe" idea, buildbot 0.8, Mozilla network problems, commit access policy, tinderbox stats, missing MDC docs, etc.

The big things for me this week was surely the Data Manager, which I could bring up to show and manage almost all of the data I want to cover in its first incarnation. Version 0.3, which is up on AMO now, can display cookies, permissions, content prefs, passwords, and form data and also delete/manage selected entries of everything but the rarely used content prefs.
What's missing next to content pref deletion is sorting in some of the lists, some context menus on the lists, the "forget all data from this domain" function as well as dynamic updates of shown lists and tabs when the data changes from any indirect manipulation. Those are what I want to get done before calling this work a 1.0 version.
I'm also thinking about possibly replacing the tabs with sub-items in the domain tree - unless I find an even better idea. The tabs are good in principle but tabs within a tab feel somewhat strange. I'm open for good ideas there and in any other way on that Data Manager.
Still, I don't want to extend its functionality too much before going 1.0, as I'd like it to be integrated in SeaMonkey 2.1 and probably replace at least the Cookie, Image, Popup, and Password Manager windows there - consolidating all their functionality and making it easier to manage, I hope. After all, SeaMonkey should make it easy for the professional user to stay in control of his or her data.