Weekly Status Report, W46/2010

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 46/2010 (November 15 - 21, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  As the first Mac64 slaves are available now, I did care to set them up correctly to run builds and tests on trunk. This was successful, and so we switched trunk to Intel 32/64bit universal builds and finally dropped PPC support from SeaMonkey 2.1 nightlies (and future milestone/release builds). I needed some trickery to support running debug builds and tests on 32bit Leopard still, while not producing any other trunk builds on that, but I could get it to work, and so we are running debug tests on both that and 64bit Snow Leopard now. There's no change to 2.0, by the way, it still receives nightlies and updates with PPC support for as long as we maintain it.
  I also did a few comm-central build system reviews this week.
• Places:
  I landed the ports of Firefox places changes in SeaMonkey this week, we should be mostly up to date with Firefox 4 in this regard now.
• Search:
  I updated the patch to port search code reviews to Firefox, hoping that this will find its way into official repositories some day.
• (Tahoe) Data Manager:
  Most of my work this week centered around add-ons - in the case of Data Manager, I worked on both the "Tahoe" add-on version and the SeaMonkey-internal implementation.
  The patch for selecting entries after delete landed on SeaMonkey trunk and is available in the 1.0.3 add-on version currently public on AMO.
  I did revise the patch for opening specific views somewhat though, as I worked through pointing UI to Data Manager instead of the older separate managers. A first patch for this is up for page info, while the 1.1 add-on (currently under review on AMO) has a full implementation of this. I realized though that for this full implementation I needed to code up something I've had in mind for some time - a selection to show domains for a specific data type only. A patch for this is up and integrated in the 1.1 add-on.
  I needed to wrestle the UI integration of the add-on for a while, esp. wrt the Firefox preferences window, and it required overriding JS functions in both SeaMonkey and Firefox, but I hope I needed up with a working solution. To be fully satisfactory, the function to add permissions will be needed as well, though.
• Jökulsárlón Download Manager:
  After some more work on it, I could announce the Jökulsárlón Download Manager add-on this week, bringing the features of the SeaMonkey download manager into a tab inside Firefox 4 or SeaMonkey 2.1!
  I have integrated previous work I had done on improving the progress/properties windows, which are available in that add-on as well, added a pref window to select them, and put some amount of work into making the download manager look reasonable in a tab (by eliminating its menubar and statusbar - menubar items are now available in the toolbar, the full path from the statusbar is available as a list column). In addition, I ended up adding a domain column to the download list so that you see from where you did get those files, as well as making the browser more responsive while loading the list.
  The add-on is currently under review on AMO, but already available in the sandbox, comments/feedback is appreciated.
  I have more work in mind for this add-on, though probably not as large items as for Data Manager, bugs/enhancements are probably best filed in my personal Bugzilla as this is a personal project.
• SeaMonkey development website:
  My SeaMonkey development website had some problems recently with gathering data from Bugzilla, I switched all that gathering to bzAPI now instead of csv and microsummary output types of regular Bugzilla bug list pages. With this change, things should work nicely now - and reading JSON is surely nicer than reading CSV or parsing strings, even from PHP.
• German Dictionaries:
  The new versions of the German spellchecker dictionary (including Austrian and Swiss variants) was approved on AMO, so now they work fine with Mozilla-2.0-based applications (and it got an update of the underlying dictionary code as well).
• German L10n:
  I landed another help update from Michael (thanks for that work!) and discussed a few topics that came up again when Kadir went through all the open bugs in our Bugzilla component - some nice progress and nice cleanup achieved there!
• Various Discussions:
  Module owners, Mozilla websites, Vienna meeting outcome, SeaMonkey's and my future, 1.9.1 branch breakage, etc.

I just realized that recently, I have put quite a few pieces of work on the shoulders of the AMO editors/reviewers team, by uploading new dictionary versions, two new "Tahoe" versions and the all-new "Jökulsárlón". Well, I guess that's what that team is there for, and I encourage everyone who knows enough about code and writing add-ons to join that group, you're always needed there, and those reviews are a major part in why the Mozilla add-on ecosystem is working that well.
In general, I think we need to put a lot more thought into the add-on system, as this is a really central point to Mozilla's success, and an open add-on system is directly pushing forward the mission - in the future probably in concert with a really open web application exchange (I'm not sure if "market" is the right word there).
Also, in the light of driving the web and HTML forward, we might want to think about if we can bring things that make add-ons really great technically to the web as a standard... HTML overlays anyone?