Weekly Status Report, W38/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 38/2010 (September 20 - 26, 2010):

• Build Machines and System:
  After our Windows builds had been broken with yet another problem of us not building libxul, Mark Banner bit the bullet and made SeaMonkey and Thunderbird build on libxul by default and on all our build machines. I then worked on cleaning out old builds and making packaging fit with that change.
  Based on that work, I worked on enabling Plugin Crash Detection (Out of process plugins) for SeaMonkey and succeeded. But then, we found out that universal builds were broken due to PPC not enabling that feature, it had build problems, for which I had to do several iterations of patches until it was fixed.
  Those switches also came out with linking a debug libxul needing a real lot of RAM, esp. on Linux, and so we needed to request increasing memory on build machines, which was mostly done, but brought up other problems, like the Parallels host not being able to support that much RAM on VMs and one build machine being down now as a result. Due to that, we had hiccups in the whole system, as even the build master runs on that host, and some some Mac minis are missing right now after reboots and we need Mozilla IT to manually tackle them. I hope everything turns out alright in the end, but it's another sign of how fragile our build machine pools are at the moment. I'm working on improvements, though, but need to convince the heads of Mozilla to help us there.
• Data Manager:
  Ian did his reviews on Data Manager, we filed some more followup bugs, and I fixed up some things in the code, but in the end, this feature that IMHO makes SeaMonkey stand out somewhat could land and is a part of SeaMonkey now!
• OpenSearch:
  OpenSearch support got reviews from Karsten after I did another iteration of the patch. Now I'm waiting on super-review before being able to land that as well, which I hope can still be done before this week's string freeze for SeaMonkey 2.1b1, so localizers will adapt to this now for the first beta instead of their work getting broken later on.
• Personas:
  My patch for making sidebar look good with Personas got reviews and could land, so browser windows should look good with lightweight themes in the upcoming beta.
• Places:
  When I landed places bookmarks, I unintentionally gave us a broken Move Bookmarks dialog. I finally found out what was wrong and fixed that.
• German Community:
  I added a few more people to Planet Mozilla (de), I hope more will join this in the upcoming times.
• Various Discussions:
  JavaScript speed and my Mandelbrot demo, SeaMonkey Development Meeting, visit to Bay Area and Mozilla HQ, resolving gcc 4.5 issues, Firefox add-on bar, doorhangers, 2.1b1 freeze and adding another beta, Mozilla web task force and domain name strategy, etc.

A lot of great things are happening right now that should make SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 a really compelling milestone for testing what's upcoming for our next stable release - and that one will be surely be the best application suite we ever delivered, as it should be.
Next week I'll be on a mission to improve cooperation with Mozilla Corporation and visit / work from their headquarters in Mountain View, and I also hope to be able to start creation of our Beta 1 builds from there, which we should still release before most of our major contributor meet face to face here in Vienna.

Interesting times we're living in, indeed!