The roads I take...
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11. Juni 2007
The trouble with forking
As you might know, a long time ago, some group of people decided to fork some parts of Mozilla and create a lean, shiny, new browser. What came out of that was not only Firefox but also a "new toolkit" that was used instead of the "old xpfe" as a backend for this new generation of applications that Firefox and Thunderbird spearheaded. What started as a fork of xpfe became the main toolkit over time and now is one of the core parts of the XULRunner environment.
Nowadays that SeaMonkey has been ported over to this new toolkit, we're trying to do some housekeeping and cleaning up the old code. But, as it turns out, not all of the "old code" is older than the "new code". In fact, some fixes and improvements were done on the "old" fork but haven't made it into the "new" one. This means that the old xpfe code includes some good, newer work than the new toolkit code, and deleting the old code would throw away a version that has valuable fixes.
While the old code will live on in the history of the mozilla.org code repository and can be retrieved from there any time, people usually don't look up code there that has been deleted from the mainline.
So, what we need to do is at least file bugs, possibly with patches to toolkit, to have some tracking of what needs to be done, before we can put the "old" code to rest.
We could need your help for this unforking work, which might be a good starting point for new contributors, as the code for most of the work is already there. Good starting points are the pointers in the themes cleanup bug and the dependencies on the resync xpfe bindings with toolkit widgets bug - we might be able to give you even more pointers on IRC.
Hope to get some helping hands on that, it will improve the toolkit we all are using!
Nowadays that SeaMonkey has been ported over to this new toolkit, we're trying to do some housekeeping and cleaning up the old code. But, as it turns out, not all of the "old code" is older than the "new code". In fact, some fixes and improvements were done on the "old" fork but haven't made it into the "new" one. This means that the old xpfe code includes some good, newer work than the new toolkit code, and deleting the old code would throw away a version that has valuable fixes.
While the old code will live on in the history of the mozilla.org code repository and can be retrieved from there any time, people usually don't look up code there that has been deleted from the mainline.
So, what we need to do is at least file bugs, possibly with patches to toolkit, to have some tracking of what needs to be done, before we can put the "old" code to rest.
We could need your help for this unforking work, which might be a good starting point for new contributors, as the code for most of the work is already there. Good starting points are the pointers in the themes cleanup bug and the dependencies on the resync xpfe bindings with toolkit widgets bug - we might be able to give you even more pointers on IRC.
Hope to get some helping hands on that, it will improve the toolkit we all are using!
Von KaiRo, um 18:22 | Tags: Mozilla, SeaMonkey | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
Weekly Status Report, W23/2007
This week I've been piling up about 80 hours of work time, mostly related to SeaMonkey and Mozilla - I think that probably is not what I should be re-doing any time soon, even though interesting things like watching a space shuttle launch can be done right next to the work thanks to internet streaming.
Here's a summary of my SeaMonkey work in week 23/2007 (June 4 - 10):
I once again realized that it's a good thing to do those weekly wrapups to remember yourself what it all was that you spent you time on that week - with such a list, it happens that you forget what it even was that took up some of those hours...
Here's a summary of my SeaMonkey work in week 23/2007 (June 4 - 10):
- SeaMonkey releases:
Uploaded a few more localized and other contributed builds for 1.1.2/1.0.9 - xpfe cleanup:
As we're on toolkit now, I started to work on cleaning up xpfe/, which in turn needed a hack to get Camino away from building xpfe/bootstrap, but this is shaping up nicely. I'll look into even more cleanup in the next few days now that the tree is open and I could check in the patches I had review for.
Both in the xpfe/components and xpfe/bootstrap dirs, we can be cvs remove even more files than in the current patches, and we should kill off all the old cruft, as anyone who needs to refer to them can always go back in cvs history.
We also might need to file a few bugs though for fixes that went into xpfe but not corresponding toolkit code and improve toolkit along the way. - Killing wallet:
I posted an updated patch for the wallet -> satchel change so Neil can work on fixing up autocomplete to work with that. - places history:
The UI work seems to be getting too much for me, so I reworked the patch to user places history so that we can turn this on in any build be setting MOZ_PLACES=1 in confvars.sh but build old xpfe mork history by default, so someone else can easily look into the UI parts.
The harder part of that is sorting out a way so SeaMonkey (and Camino) get the nsIBrowserHistory interface built in toolkit (lives in history/public there) when places is turned on, but never get all of toolkit history built. I ended up proposing to remove toolkit mork history as it's not built any more by any app in the Mozilla tree. Mano didn't agree with the patch itself (the interface should probably just be move to places), but with the general idea, but wants to get an OK for removing support for mork history toolkit builds. Watch out for this happening soon in some form. - Crash reporting:
Worked with Chris Cooper from MoCo to get Talkback re-enabled on SeaMonkey trunk as far as currently possible, (and with Frank to get it correctly packaged on Windows). Also worked with Ted (luser) on figuring out how to get breakpad working for SeaMonkey. It turns out from our talking and my testing that we are on a good way for that once the breakpad people have stabilized their infrastructure enough to make other apps than Firefox (which already tests it) use this. - Startup profiling:
I created jprof-enabled build from just before the suiterunner switch to investigate the suiterunner Ts regression but the data didn't help as much as I had hoped. Boris, who knows a lot about profiling and has a slow machine, could unfortunately not run my builds due to them being linked against libpangocairo which he doesn't have on FC4. We're (again) a bit stuck on that, it seems. - Themes:
I should have finished porting over my EarlyBlue theme to suiterunner, mozapps is done (I hope my Add-Ons Manager design is fine) and I updated the suite parts for changes in Classic over the last months. I probably will still go to consolidate some icons into bigger PNG files and use -moz-image-region on them to match Classic a bit more, but after that, syncing LCARStrek will be the next task, which should prove interesting as well, esp. as all the usage of -moz-border-radius should probably look better with cairo-based UI. - Local (bug)mail housekeeping:
I'm keeping one bugmail for every bug I find interesting enough to track (or find fast when talking about them) in folders below my main inbox, and those have grown to too long lists over time, so I went through all of them, cleaned out all resolved bugs, cleaned out bugs that could be resolved but weren't marked as such, and asking for status on unclear cases. This should not only have resulted in me finding the really interesting bugs easier but also in some selected bug triage in Bugzilla, leading to a few bugs disappearing from the open lists
- Widget sync bugs:
After a bugmail from the resync xpfe bindings with toolkit widgets bug reminded me of this issue, I went through all dependent bugs and asked if we still need to port something from xpfe too toolkit there - the other way round doesn't make sense any more and if bugs were kept open only for that, we should just close them. - Various discussions:
Optional extension L10n (inspector, etc.), mailnews crashes, "turbo" mode removal, static builds, profile migration, SeaMonkey default icon set, untrusted X connections, VC8 build changes, ongoing FF3 UI discussions, etc.
I once again realized that it's a good thing to do those weekly wrapups to remember yourself what it all was that you spent you time on that week - with such a list, it happens that you forget what it even was that took up some of those hours...
Von KaiRo, um 00:39 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
