The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 42/2009 (October 12 - 18, 2009):

• Releases:
  This should hopefully have been the last week of trying to figure out what patches can still go into 2.0 and approving them, I built SeaMonkey 2.0 RC 2 (with a long track of redoing things), getting it ready for making it public yesterday (including a fix for partial updates so they apply correctly on Windows).
  This should be the final release candidate and if things go well in testing this week, it will be converted to a final 2.0 release scheduled for next Tuesday. woo-hoo!
• Smaller Fixes:
  I tested and reviewed a patch from Adrian to make extra-jar.mn work for localizers, esp. our French guys were happy about this, as they have split mail help into smaller chunks for easier L10n.
  A small patch for showing release notes on first run could also land for RC2, including a followup to make it actually work.
  And, trying to keep users' hard disks clean, I checked in a fix to remove a few unused modules on complete updates.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Catalan chatzilla and venkman was added in time for RC2, Georgian and Swedish could be added as official locales, Turkish requested to only be experimental for RC2 and final due to unfinished translations.
  With that, RC2 ships in 19 official languages including US English, plus one in experimental stage!
• Various Discussions:
  Lightning support, comm-central branching, 1.9.1.4 builds, RC1 feedback, needed build and machine updates for 2.1/m-c trees, testday, Microsoft add-ons and blocklist, etc.

I hope that finally our builds for SeaMonkey 2.0 are done - we'll see how well RC 2 holds up in testing this week, but chances are good that next Tuesday will be the big day and we can go gold, just converting those exact build to the final ones. A tremendous development effort from all around our team went into this release in the 3½ years we've now been working on it, and the What's New list in the release notes only shows the tip of the iceberg. This is the first really major release from our project after we've been releasing fixed-up, slightly improved and rebranded version of the old Mozilla suite for quite some time.
This time we ship a new suite, a modern reincarnation of the original idea, and completely done by the volunteer team of the SeaMonkey project. Thanks to everyone who helped us to come so far, every one of those people in our community can be proud of him/herself these days.

Now let's test the hell out of it this week and then actually release it - are you with me?