Weekly Status Report, W23/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 23/2010 (June 7 - 13, 2010):

• Releases:
  Continued following Firefox release discussions to determine when we can ship 2.0.5 in sync with their builds.
• Build Infrastructure:
  Installed YASM and gcc 4.5 on Linux and YASM on Mac build machines. YASM is needed for speeding up the recently landed WebM decoder, and gcc 4.5 should bring a few improvements and get us ready for potentially using PGO if we ever get enough machine power for that.
  Regarding machine power, I sent my projections on needed, wanted and ideally "like to have" hardware requirements for the SeaMonkey project to Seth from Mozilla Community Giving, in the hope that this help us getting at least the first of those categories satisfied by them. They have been very helpful so far in providing the machines we have, I hope we can continue this good collaboration.
  I also did some investigation for an upcoming buildbot upgrade, but without access to puppet packages, this is significantly more work than anticipated/hoped.
• Build System, Automated Tests:
  As a module owner, I was happy to do some reviews for the build system, as this means things are progressing - even if the list of changes to port is growing again.
  When I checked package-compare to find out if some recent test failures could be connected to missing files, I found that was not true, but we were indeed missing a file for the new Add-ons Manager, which I corrected.
  I also investigated a test leak we're experiencing. I found a way to fix this on the test side, but we should keep an eye on the issue, as the leak might also be an actual issue in our tabbrowser with tabs that are closing themselves "too fast".
• Data Manager:
  I evolved this add-on from 0.4 to 0.7 being available on AMO, and have requested this be be public now, as all major functionality is implemented. Context menus, sorting, keeping selections intact, improved cookie info, and even "forget all data from this domain" have been completed this week. The only missing piece in 0.7 is updating dynamically to data changes (those are even already observed, but noted in the error console instead of being reacted upon).
  During the work for that, I discovered that observers are broken in current password manager, but later that new bug was found to be a dupe of a two-year-old one...
• Places:
  Reacted to the first review comments on places bookmarks, with some help from the places team. I filed a bug on incorporating improvements from those comments in Firefox and could already land the first patch for that. While I'm waiting on more review, please continue testing the try builds.
• German L10n:
  After some time without updates, I did a larger L10n pass to get German SeaMonkey to go green on trunk again - including all changes in shared modules.
• Various Discussions:
  Finally posting publicly about Whistler, missing items in Mozilla timeline, graveyarding old "View Source" component, Mandelbot going public on AMO, MPL update, XPCOM changes, etc.

I've spent quite some time this week thinking about the Mozilla platform and how it is a real game-changer. As much as Firefox mas matured and a lot of the platform functionality has as well, as unpolished a diamond stays the platform itself. There's tremendous worth in it, but it looks shabby and dirty for most people who don't know it really well. I think it would take a real coordinated effort with some person/team taking a real lead to get it polished up and make it really shine, but I'm not sure how to manifest that, esp. given the way previous efforts on working on that have failed. I've even pondered the idea of having an organization like MoCo or MoMo that could take the lead, have a handful of employees and build infrastructure running builds for multiple apps in a shared environment, as build/machine requirements are pretty similar and sharing could profit all participants. But then, it would mean a significant investment to build this up, and I have no idea who would do that - and I also don't have a good model of how to sustain such an organization - yet.
If it would manifest itself, it might be a good option for SeaMonkey to work with that or even be an integral part in this, I believe.

Back enough with dreams for the moment, I have enough real work to do after all.