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Our First "Oilspill"

In previous years, when we had a public security or grave stability problem in a "stable" release and needed to go into fast-pace mode to get update out as fast as possible to fix that, we called that a "firedrill". Still, that name is not very accurate, as it's a real problem case, not just a drill for one.

So, recently, Mozilla land adopted the name "chemspill" for those - needing to clean up after spilling chemicals represent the actual case better for sure.

But then, after recent events, I realized that for maritime life-forms like Sea-Monkeys, it's really more fitting to call it an "oilspill" in our project. Thank goodness, we didn't need that expression for quite some time after I came up with it - until now.

With SeaMonkey 2.0.7, we saw a sudden rise of a previously-rare crash signature in our topcrasher statistics, along with comments from users that it was on launch after updating that this happened, and the affected users were not able to run SeaMonkey at all any more in this version. Now, that's unacceptable, of course, so we stopped issuing updates from 2.0.6 on the release channel and went into investigating the problem.

It turned out that we had both a problem on our side with cleanup after updates as well as a platform problem that affected Firefox and Thunderbird as well, and it looks like both together were even worse for us. We found fixes for both now and decided to take a fix for font face in HTML email signatures along for the ride on creating a fast update that has nothing but those changes in comparison to the 2.0.7 release.

We now have candidate builds of this SeaMonkey 2.0.8 version up for testing and will ship it to the public between today and Friday of this week if everything looks as good as expected with it.

So, after all, we have our first "oilspill" release situation on our hands and I hope we are dealing with it in a satisfactory way. I just wish that real oil spills would be as easy to deal with as those in our software.

Entry written by KaiRo and posted on September 15th, 2010 16:08 | Tags: chemspill, firedrill, Mozilla, oilspill, release, SeaMonkey, SeaMonkey 2 | 11 comments

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    AuthorEntry

    EP

    quote
    You are not alone, KaiRo. Mozilla is planning to release Firefox versions 3.5.13 and 3.6.10 between this Wednesday and this Friday; way ahead of schedule.
    2010-09-15 19:20

    KaiRo

    Webmaster

    quote
    I know, as I said, one of those startup crashers is a platform thing. I'm in close coordination with the Firefox and Thunderbird teams, they both will release updates today or tomorrow.
    2010-09-15 19:48

    Dove

    quote
    Robert, you are the Great man, thank you for your great work !!!

    By the way, are any plans for 2.2 version buildings ?

    I saw in gecko2 (in new ff4 betas(already 7 beta!!!)) many good stuffs , like separate plugins process and a very clever packing resources in one .jar file; this must bring more speed and usability to our lovely navigator !
    2010-09-15 22:03

    KaiRo

    Webmaster

    quote
    Dove, we still hope to get all that into the 2.1 release!
    2010-09-16 02:09

    Dove

    quote
    Am I right, 2.1 release will be on Gecko2 ? (that comes with ff4 I mean)
    It would be so magnificent ...
    2010-09-16 04:49

    KaiRo

    Webmaster

    quote
    Yes, SeaMonkey 2.1 is the parallel release to Firefox 4.0, both based on Gecko 2.0 - and yes, those releases will both be quite cool! :)
    2010-09-16 19:25

    EP

    quote
    Dove, Firefox 4 has not reached 7 betas yet.
    And yes, the "final" release of Seamonkey 2.1 will be based on Gecko 2.0 (AND will still run under a minimum of Win2000).
    2010-09-17 19:06

    Dove

    quote
    sorry, of course 6beta and 7pre ...
    I should had looking at roadmap updating more often )) I thought it planned on 1.9.3
    But it's a really good news about gecko2 in 2.1 !!!
    2010-09-18 01:35

    Philipp

    quote
    Gecko 1.9.3 is Gecko 2.0 ;)
    2010-09-21 15:30

    Dove

    quote
    Ups,didn't know ; I thought like that because I didn't see yet plugins process and clever .jar packing resources , which I saw in ff4b with gecko2 :)
    2010-09-26 10:46

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