The roads I take...
KaiRo's weBlog
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31. Jänner 2010
"Everything Is A Tab" Seems Seductive!
About a year ago, in my FOSDEM 2009 talk, I presented our future vision for SeaMonkey, containing the "Everything Is A Tab" plan that should bring browser, mail, web editing, and probably even preferences into tabs that can live in the same window.
Now I read in jboriss' blog post on add-on manager that the Firefox team is thinking about putting the add-on manager in atab, and possibly also - who would have thought that - preferences!
Sounds like different people come to the same ideas, and I really hope we can move that way - esp. as this, when it is done correctly, should still allow anyone to open those things as "the only tab in a window" which should make it act and feel just like a normal standalone window and so still gets the same user experience to those people who don't want to have all those things in tabs.
(That said, I still think tabs are mostly an excuse for having a bad window manager and bad window managment widgets in the desktop environment, but having gone through some strange bugs in my on-the-edge development desktop versions, I needed to resort to tabs as well and found the grouping of related tabs in windows an actually quite interesting and seductive feature myself...)
I just wonder who will manage to get the "Everything Is A Tab" story actually implemented first - Firefox may have the advantage of a larger development team and fewer different things to host in tabs...
Now I read in jboriss' blog post on add-on manager that the Firefox team is thinking about putting the add-on manager in atab, and possibly also - who would have thought that - preferences!
Sounds like different people come to the same ideas, and I really hope we can move that way - esp. as this, when it is done correctly, should still allow anyone to open those things as "the only tab in a window" which should make it act and feel just like a normal standalone window and so still gets the same user experience to those people who don't want to have all those things in tabs.
(That said, I still think tabs are mostly an excuse for having a bad window manager and bad window managment widgets in the desktop environment, but having gone through some strange bugs in my on-the-edge development desktop versions, I needed to resort to tabs as well and found the grouping of related tabs in windows an actually quite interesting and seductive feature myself...)
I just wonder who will manage to get the "Everything Is A Tab" story actually implemented first - Firefox may have the advantage of a larger development team and fewer different things to host in tabs...
Von KaiRo, um 00:16 | Tags: Mozilla, plans, SeaMonkey | 5 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
26. Jänner 2010
No FOSDEM For Me This Year
So, I have been asked a number of times already if I will be at FOSDEM in a little less than two weeks, some even took that for granted, given that I've been there every time since we've had a Mozilla room there - and some people were shocked to hear me saying I won't be there this year.
So, to not needing to explain it in detail to everyone out there, here is why:
Unfortunately, a good friend's 30-year birthday party and the Super Bowl with the first time "my" team (New Orleans Saints) playing in that game (I somehow felt all along that it would happen this time) are the two reasons I already told publicly, but there's more behind it:
At the time when I needed to make the call if I go, I felt very tense and knew I need to get less busy and more rested while still more productive, while the conference does not serve any of that, unfortunately. While meeting all those people and discussing is surely a positive experience by itself, it usually doesn't make me more relaxed and I already felt that with the reduced amount of invitations, the SeaMonkey crowd would significantly decrease and I could get more work for us done when I'm not there.
I'm feeling better right now and can get some things done at the moment, but I still think the decision was for the best, even if it also has its downsides.
I hope there will be other possibilities to meet up with a number of Mozilla people this year (e.g. I heard rumors of another Summit and I'm sure there will be other events in Europe as well), so I hope things work out alright. And next year, I might make it to FOSDEM again as well.
So, to not needing to explain it in detail to everyone out there, here is why:
Unfortunately, a good friend's 30-year birthday party and the Super Bowl with the first time "my" team (New Orleans Saints) playing in that game (I somehow felt all along that it would happen this time) are the two reasons I already told publicly, but there's more behind it:
At the time when I needed to make the call if I go, I felt very tense and knew I need to get less busy and more rested while still more productive, while the conference does not serve any of that, unfortunately. While meeting all those people and discussing is surely a positive experience by itself, it usually doesn't make me more relaxed and I already felt that with the reduced amount of invitations, the SeaMonkey crowd would significantly decrease and I could get more work for us done when I'm not there.
I'm feeling better right now and can get some things done at the moment, but I still think the decision was for the best, even if it also has its downsides.
I hope there will be other possibilities to meet up with a number of Mozilla people this year (e.g. I heard rumors of another Summit and I'm sure there will be other events in Europe as well), so I hope things work out alright. And next year, I might make it to FOSDEM again as well.
Von KaiRo, um 17:46 | Tags: FOSDEM, Mozilla | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 0
25. Jänner 2010
Weekly Status Report, W03/2010
Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2010 (January 18 - 24, 2010):
This has been a really productive week again and it feels good to get real things moving and also start to do work and planning for SeaMonkey 2.1 now, turning the head back and putting out fires on 2.0 was really getting tedious - even though we have a slightly conservative approach here in SeaMonkey land, we are as much about progress and innovation as the rest of the Mozilla project (even if it is in our way and sometimes means the some changes are not as much into-your-face and revolutionary as in other projects but have more of a continuity label on them).
I hope we all can get into this more again now and get some exciting patches landed for the next version of our great suite.
- Build Infrastructure:
A lot of more work on L10n nightly updates until I finally got then to work. Note that any SeaMonkey nightly updates are complete updates only, as the tooling to do partials for nightlies on our normal build machine pools is not done yet, currently waiting on Mozilla RelEng there. Getting our nightly updates to work correctly needed changes across 3-4 repositories (including mozilla-central and comm-central), but everyone was cooperative and it ended up great.
The next step I had on my mind was switching to packaged tests, both for being nearer to what Firefox run and making it possible to run test suite in parallel, esp. as mochitest-plain runs really long. To my surprise, this worked well, I needed only one small change to the generic test factory and it worked for SeaMonkey (I later coded up an improvement to report Mozilla revisions, but things worked fine without it) and tests did run fine except for a mailnews xpcshell problem, which I hope will be dealt with soon. With that, I could officially do the switch for the most part.
I also did experimentally create some hourly builders to run on a 1.9.2 tree, which we don't really want to target for SeaMonkey, but want to at least build fine. I spotted a packaging problem that was a regression form a recent build system port and Serge swiftly fixed that one - thanks for that!
And, as I now know how to deal with packaged tests and in the new architecture we should run them on normal debug and even optimized builds, I turned on the xpcshell test suite for SeaMonkey trunk Linux builds (the debug ones we do for leak testing), even if a number of failures show up there - it's the first step to fixing them. A one-cycle test run of the other suites pointed to some more issues to fix, but we don't have the machine power right now to run them all the time. - Download Progress Windows:
After some proposals have come up for fixing progress window shortcomings, we were looking for icons that were usable under our licenses, and when those failed to materialize, I went and created my own SVG icons to match the small ones we have right now, so I could produce larger versions. Having done that, I worked on patching the dialog and posted screen shots of this work in progress in the bug.
Back when I did the version of those windows that is in 2.0 right now, I did the fastest solution I could while still applying a design facelift, now for 2.1 we should have the time to improve on that and correct problems we see with this 2.0 design.
I also updated my patch for moving core build master code to a shared place. - History Expiration:
I'm risking the next flame war against me with this, but I did a patch to react to the places expiration rework done for the whole Mozilla platform, which also removes the ability to limit history to a fixed number of days or sites, but instead goes with a memory percentage. We will need to implement the cleaning up private data based on time frames to complement this to at least reduce the complaints, I think. While working on this, I saw that Thunderbird also has prefs for this around and filed a bug for them as well. - SeaMonkey L10n:
As mentioned above, L10n nightly updates for SeaMonkey trunk work now, I posted to the L10n newsgroups about this as well. - Various Discussions:
Add-on compatibility communication, new machines, comm-central policy for requiring tests, nightly.m.o, possible platform roadmap options, Firebug 1.5 release, Firefox 3.6 release, external linkage for mailnews, KompoZer and SeaMonkey, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, community-based geolocation service, etc.
This has been a really productive week again and it feels good to get real things moving and also start to do work and planning for SeaMonkey 2.1 now, turning the head back and putting out fires on 2.0 was really getting tedious - even though we have a slightly conservative approach here in SeaMonkey land, we are as much about progress and innovation as the rest of the Mozilla project (even if it is in our way and sometimes means the some changes are not as much into-your-face and revolutionary as in other projects but have more of a continuity label on them).
I hope we all can get into this more again now and get some exciting patches landed for the next version of our great suite.
Von KaiRo, um 17:36 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | 3 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
What a Game! What a Champion! Who Dat!
I didn't tell this much around here, as I rarely talk about things here that have no connection at all to Mozilla, but here it is: I'm a huge American Football fan, and a proud member of "Who Dat Nation", i.e. a New Orleans Saints fan - the latter started a short time after Katrina, and last November, getting to know this city, it just intensified even more.
And I just watched the NFL conference championship games - while the AFC game was good, the NFC game of the Minnesota Vikings at the Saints was just awesome. I've been excited for a week about the great match-up this was to be, but the game itself was even better - always at the brink of turning around, getting fans like me shivering with excitement at the end, when it even went into overtime and had a few close calls.
Two teams playing each other that were known for great quarterbacks and great offenses - but the game showed what the regular seasons shadowed, and that is how great both defenses can actually play. Yes, I mean both. Until the last second, any team could have come out as the winner, and both played great football. The was the quality of a game that I love watching football for, and that I'd love to see at a Super Bowl - and that just might come up in two weeks.
And the great NFC champion that could come out ahead is not just a team, not just Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, Sean Payton, and a lot of other players, coaches and other staff - that champion is the whole city of New Orleans. The Saints have said a number of times that they are playing for this city, most of the players and staff are actively supporting a lot of efforts for rebuilding this city, helping with all the recovery activities, playing in the Superdome that served as an emergency shelter 4.5 years ago and winning this championship for the city on exactly the same ground. This is a sign for the whole Gulf Coast Region. Great things can happen there.
This is the first time this team earned its entry into the Super Bowl, where it will play in two weeks time - in Southern Florida, not too far from the very same Gulf of Mexico. Their opponent is another tough nut to crack. I hope it will be a spectacular and fun-to-watch game, whoever wins in the end - those games are what I love football for - even though a Saints win would be icing on the cake for sure.
Who Dat!
And I just watched the NFL conference championship games - while the AFC game was good, the NFC game of the Minnesota Vikings at the Saints was just awesome. I've been excited for a week about the great match-up this was to be, but the game itself was even better - always at the brink of turning around, getting fans like me shivering with excitement at the end, when it even went into overtime and had a few close calls.
Two teams playing each other that were known for great quarterbacks and great offenses - but the game showed what the regular seasons shadowed, and that is how great both defenses can actually play. Yes, I mean both. Until the last second, any team could have come out as the winner, and both played great football. The was the quality of a game that I love watching football for, and that I'd love to see at a Super Bowl - and that just might come up in two weeks.
And the great NFC champion that could come out ahead is not just a team, not just Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, Sean Payton, and a lot of other players, coaches and other staff - that champion is the whole city of New Orleans. The Saints have said a number of times that they are playing for this city, most of the players and staff are actively supporting a lot of efforts for rebuilding this city, helping with all the recovery activities, playing in the Superdome that served as an emergency shelter 4.5 years ago and winning this championship for the city on exactly the same ground. This is a sign for the whole Gulf Coast Region. Great things can happen there.
This is the first time this team earned its entry into the Super Bowl, where it will play in two weeks time - in Southern Florida, not too far from the very same Gulf of Mexico. Their opponent is another tough nut to crack. I hope it will be a spectacular and fun-to-watch game, whoever wins in the end - those games are what I love football for - even though a Saints win would be icing on the cake for sure.
Who Dat!
Von KaiRo, um 04:53 | Tags: New Orleans, NFL, Saints, Super Bowl | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 1
22. Jänner 2010
Running of Tests on SeaMonkey2.0 Split Up
One thing is closely following after the other, now that I have synched up even the master configuration the the SeaMonkey buildbots with what Firefox has.
First I got L10n nightlies triggering again (and in a much better way, actually), then they did even gain automated updates, and after that I started experimenting with running what we call "packaged tests".
What that means is that all files for running our test suites get packaged up and uploaded to FTP, from where any machine can pull and run them. With this configuration, we can make test suites run in parallel if idle machines are available, and therefore shorten the time until all of them are run complete. Also, they show up as distinct columns on tinderbox so one test suite failing doesn't turn the whole unit test column orange but only the one for that suite, and failures indifferent suite can more easily be tracked individually.
Our only tree running tests right now is the SeaMonkey2.0 one, and I now have turned on running tests that way there - with the exception of xpcshell tests, as mailnews tests have a remaining issue that needs to be solved first. The old "unit test" columns now only do the builds, package up those and the tests, trigger the other test runs, and then run "make check" (binary tests, cannot be packaged) and the xpcshell tests. Everything else runs in different columns.
As a future step, we might be even able to not create special builds for the test runs, but have them run on builds that are done for the other columns anyhow.
First I got L10n nightlies triggering again (and in a much better way, actually), then they did even gain automated updates, and after that I started experimenting with running what we call "packaged tests".
What that means is that all files for running our test suites get packaged up and uploaded to FTP, from where any machine can pull and run them. With this configuration, we can make test suites run in parallel if idle machines are available, and therefore shorten the time until all of them are run complete. Also, they show up as distinct columns on tinderbox so one test suite failing doesn't turn the whole unit test column orange but only the one for that suite, and failures indifferent suite can more easily be tracked individually.
Our only tree running tests right now is the SeaMonkey2.0 one, and I now have turned on running tests that way there - with the exception of xpcshell tests, as mailnews tests have a remaining issue that needs to be solved first. The old "unit test" columns now only do the builds, package up those and the tests, trigger the other test runs, and then run "make check" (binary tests, cannot be packaged) and the xpcshell tests. Everything else runs in different columns.
As a future step, we might be even able to not create special builds for the test runs, but have them run on builds that are done for the other columns anyhow.
Von KaiRo, um 21:42 | Tags: Mozilla, SeaMonkey, tests | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 1
21. Jänner 2010
Automated Updates for Localized SeaMonkey Trunk Nightlies
I've been working on this for a few days now - and with some teak of last night it finally started working:
Localized nightlies for SeaMonkey "trunk" (i.e. those from latest-comm-central-trunk-l10n) now get automated updates, just like the US English ones do!
Of course, you'll only get an update if one is available, but string changes in Mozilla or SeaMonkey areas should not pose problems, our build system "merges" localizations for nightlies with the US English strings, so that you just will see untranslated strings where the localizer still has work to do.
In case ChatZilla or venkman have missing strings, we will break in the build stage and not produce nightlies or updates, though, as the "l10n-merge" process is currently unable to deal with those extensions.
I hope nightly testers will be happy and our localizations will get even more testing even before we ship alphas, betas or releases!
Localized nightlies for SeaMonkey "trunk" (i.e. those from latest-comm-central-trunk-l10n) now get automated updates, just like the US English ones do!
Of course, you'll only get an update if one is available, but string changes in Mozilla or SeaMonkey areas should not pose problems, our build system "merges" localizations for nightlies with the US English strings, so that you just will see untranslated strings where the localizer still has work to do.
In case ChatZilla or venkman have missing strings, we will break in the build stage and not produce nightlies or updates, though, as the "l10n-merge" process is currently unable to deal with those extensions.
I hope nightly testers will be happy and our localizations will get even more testing even before we ship alphas, betas or releases!
Von KaiRo, um 16:03 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 2
SeaMonkey 2.1 planning
Now that our last stable release has been shipped, the first updates have been done to make it even more solid, and the holidays have passed, it's time to start concentrating on our next feature release a bit more.
This includes trying to come up with some kind of plans, as we've seen in the quite long SeaMonkey 2.0 development period that we only get good at progress when we have good plans for what we want to do and even when we want to have it done.
So, there are a number of things we know about this upcoming release already:
From how I know our work flow, and where we stand right now, i.e. completely at the beginning of 2.1 work, I estimate the earliest possible time we could stabilize for a release would be in June or July of this year - on the other hand, we should not take longer than a year after 2.0 to release, as we really need to show that we are more active that ever and that SeaMonkey is not a dying product but going quite strong. It's better to release more often in smaller steps and put off some work to the next release than to make the impression that nothing is going on and lose people to Firefox, Thunderbird, or Opera.
Some point of insecurity in our planning is that the Mozilla platform doesn't have any clear roadmap for 2010 or even the next months as of now. Originally, there was a plan to release 1.9.3 in summer, but Firefox developers feel that too frequent updates can be painful for add-on users and authors and wonder if and which features from development they can backport to the stable 1.9.2 series instead. A summer platform release would probably fit our release plans very well, but from where we are now, we can't count on that.
Because of that, we need to see that we have our code compatible with 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 at the same time, so we can jump either way depending on where the platform plans manifest themselves. I guess we can keep that up for a few weeks, but as soon as we come to an alpha, we at least need to pronounce one tree to be official. Given our lack of build machines, we can only run tests on 1.9.1 right now and only do nightlies for one tree next to 1.9.1, but I hope that will change (I did set up some experimental build trees for 1.9.2 now, at least, but they only do "hourly" builds, which take up less time on the machines).
In any case, now is the right time to really start attacking all the things we want to have implemented in a SeaMonkey 2.1 release, and help from everyone is highly recommended!
Also, please make sure all regressions from 2.0 to current trunk nightlies are filed in Bugzilla, marked as regressions, and possibly at least nominated for blocking-seamonkey2.1a1 so that we can make sure we know where we are for eventually shipping that beast.
We will want to have at least one alpha and one beta, which 6-8 weeks spacing between those and from the last beta to release, so you can easily see how we need to come near to having real plans in our minds.
What opinions does the community have on that? What can you do to help us reach a good and possibly even better release than the last one?
Remember, this community does not work by telling others what to do (not even I or the SeaMonkey Council can do that), but by standing up, taking matters into your own hands and working together for a really valuable community-driven SeaMonkey product.
So what can you do, can you work with what I writing about here? How can plans be made to accommodate your work better?
This includes trying to come up with some kind of plans, as we've seen in the quite long SeaMonkey 2.0 development period that we only get good at progress when we have good plans for what we want to do and even when we want to have it done.
So, there are a number of things we know about this upcoming release already:
- We probably want to name it "SeaMonkey 2.1".
- It should incrementally improve on 2.0, incorporate a few things we let slip for that previous release, and be a much smaller and faster step than 2.0.
- We have a good number of wanted features/improvements (with even more nominated), among them being mailnews API refactorings, OpenSearch, form data editor, places bookmarks, and more theme icon work.
- We want to use a newer Gecko/platform version than 1.9.1 and ideally connect up to being at the edge of Gecko releases once again.
- Platform changes in newer versions might influence SeaMonkey features (e.g. any post-1.9.1 version loses import of download history - a minor inconvenience, but a nice example).
- We would really like to pick up startup improvements of newer platform releases, esp. 1.9.3, and the out-of-process-plugins (OOPP) feature as soon as possible once it's stable (Flash crashing won't take down both browser and mailnews any more, it will just make the plugin stop working in that one tab).
- We need more build infrastructure to support this release as an additional build/release tree (bugs are filed, but the process to actually get things done always takes a while).
From how I know our work flow, and where we stand right now, i.e. completely at the beginning of 2.1 work, I estimate the earliest possible time we could stabilize for a release would be in June or July of this year - on the other hand, we should not take longer than a year after 2.0 to release, as we really need to show that we are more active that ever and that SeaMonkey is not a dying product but going quite strong. It's better to release more often in smaller steps and put off some work to the next release than to make the impression that nothing is going on and lose people to Firefox, Thunderbird, or Opera.
Some point of insecurity in our planning is that the Mozilla platform doesn't have any clear roadmap for 2010 or even the next months as of now. Originally, there was a plan to release 1.9.3 in summer, but Firefox developers feel that too frequent updates can be painful for add-on users and authors and wonder if and which features from development they can backport to the stable 1.9.2 series instead. A summer platform release would probably fit our release plans very well, but from where we are now, we can't count on that.
Because of that, we need to see that we have our code compatible with 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 at the same time, so we can jump either way depending on where the platform plans manifest themselves. I guess we can keep that up for a few weeks, but as soon as we come to an alpha, we at least need to pronounce one tree to be official. Given our lack of build machines, we can only run tests on 1.9.1 right now and only do nightlies for one tree next to 1.9.1, but I hope that will change (I did set up some experimental build trees for 1.9.2 now, at least, but they only do "hourly" builds, which take up less time on the machines).
In any case, now is the right time to really start attacking all the things we want to have implemented in a SeaMonkey 2.1 release, and help from everyone is highly recommended!
Also, please make sure all regressions from 2.0 to current trunk nightlies are filed in Bugzilla, marked as regressions, and possibly at least nominated for blocking-seamonkey2.1a1 so that we can make sure we know where we are for eventually shipping that beast.
We will want to have at least one alpha and one beta, which 6-8 weeks spacing between those and from the last beta to release, so you can easily see how we need to come near to having real plans in our minds.
What opinions does the community have on that? What can you do to help us reach a good and possibly even better release than the last one?
Remember, this community does not work by telling others what to do (not even I or the SeaMonkey Council can do that), but by standing up, taking matters into your own hands and working together for a really valuable community-driven SeaMonkey product.
So what can you do, can you work with what I writing about here? How can plans be made to accommodate your work better?
Von KaiRo, um 14:46 | Tags: Mozilla, SeaMonkey, SeaMonkey 2.1 | 12 Kommentare | TrackBack: 1
19. Jänner 2010
Firebug 1.5 available for SeaMonkey 2.0!
Now, how cool is that?
The Firebug team just announced that their 1.5 version is now available from the addons-mozilla.org ("AMO") website - and this version even supports SeaMonkey 2.0 now!
You don't believe it? Look here:
Install Firebug 1.5 in SeaMonkey 2.0
I have already tried and installed it from their website before, and I have it just right in my browser windows now! I haven't tried it yet, but it has a few things that look interesting, I surely will dig into it when I have time, I already heard a lot of praise about this development tool from the Firefox world, and now I can even use it!
So, after Lightning, we have another one of the big Mozilla add-ons work in SeaMonkey 2.0 - I hope that's the real start for a solid success story now.
Once again, this has been enabled by someone from our great SeaMonkey community, in this case Jens Hatlak (InvisibleSmiley), thanks a lot for testing and writing up patches for this. Also a big "thank you" to the Firebug team for taking those patches quite fast and even convincing AMO that our application suite is really supported!
The Firebug team just announced that their 1.5 version is now available from the addons-mozilla.org ("AMO") website - and this version even supports SeaMonkey 2.0 now!
You don't believe it? Look here:
Install Firebug 1.5 in SeaMonkey 2.0
I have already tried and installed it from their website before, and I have it just right in my browser windows now! I haven't tried it yet, but it has a few things that look interesting, I surely will dig into it when I have time, I already heard a lot of praise about this development tool from the Firefox world, and now I can even use it!
So, after Lightning, we have another one of the big Mozilla add-ons work in SeaMonkey 2.0 - I hope that's the real start for a solid success story now.
Once again, this has been enabled by someone from our great SeaMonkey community, in this case Jens Hatlak (InvisibleSmiley), thanks a lot for testing and writing up patches for this. Also a big "thank you" to the Firebug team for taking those patches quite fast and even convincing AMO that our application suite is really supported!
Von KaiRo, um 22:30 | Tags: Add-Ons, AMO, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, SeaMonkey 2 | 2 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
18. Jänner 2010
Weekly Status Report, W02/2010
Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 02/2010 (January 11 - 17, 2010):
Work is definitely picking up, and I've also started trying the Mozilla Status Board tool, which will not replace but be an addition to my updates here - with the benefit of having a section of what I'm planning to do next. And my list of "next" items was quite large last week, I'll probably need to keep a few on that list this time as well...
- Releases:
SeaMonkey 2.0.2 was released on Monday, mainly fixing a Windows mailcompose freeze which was a regression from 2.0.1 work. The previous 2.0.2 scheduled for early February was renamed to 2.0.3 and moved to the middle of that month. - Build Infrastructure:
I finally attacked the problem of L10n nightlies not being triggered and for that moved right over to mirroring the Firefox setup as closely as possible. After fixing a glitch from some wrong variable-repurposing for WinCE build work, it was a success in that our new config allows us to go for things like split test cycles much more easily and that L10n nightlies are being produced, but I needed to split L10n nightly updates into a different bug and do some more work on that - and we're not completely there yet.
Also, the release automation bustage fix found with 2.0.2 work could be checked in, as well as the switch of release automation to pulling chatzilla from hg, which I now found time to write a patch for. - SeaMonkey L10n:
I finally came around to activating Italian ChatZilla and venkman, and Ukrainian SeaMonkey.
As said above, work is going on for L10n nightly updates - right now, everything is actually working except that a wrong patch is being written into the snippets and so no update can be installed, even though builds know that it's available. I'm working on fixes for that (needs work across three Mercurial repositories). - German L10n:
To have something for reasonably testing the L10n building updates on trunk, I wanted German to build alright, so I went in and finally updated ChatZilla and venkman localizations, and while I was at it, DOM inspector and SeaMonkey as well. I also did small updates to DOM and security to sync them to current trunk development, but toolkit still needs a bit more work to be green on trunk. - Various Discussions:
Add-on compatibility center, new machines, comm-central policy for requiring tests, plans or no plans for platform releases, Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 release, external linkage for mailnews, Manifesto and privacy, profile management future, KompoZer and SeaMonkey, etc.
Work is definitely picking up, and I've also started trying the Mozilla Status Board tool, which will not replace but be an addition to my updates here - with the benefit of having a section of what I'm planning to do next. And my list of "next" items was quite large last week, I'll probably need to keep a few on that list this time as well...
Von KaiRo, um 20:52 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
14. Jänner 2010
Lightning Now Officially Supports SeaMonkey 2!
You might already have read about the release of Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 - maybe you even remember my earlier posts about SeaMonkey 2 and Lightning. And now here's the good news, right from the announcement the calendar team made:
You can install Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 from AMO and manage your calendars now directly from within the SeaMonkey Mail & Newsgroups component.
We have been working closely with the calendar team to make Lightning work as well as possible within SeaMonkey, but we're also sure things can be improved further, and any help is appreciated.
Also, both the SeaMonkey and calendar teams appreciate testing of this Beta and reporting bugs, so we can make your calendaring experience with SeaMonkey and Lightning even better in the future!
Quote:
Lightning now supports SeaMonkey 2.0 as a host application
You can install Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 from AMO and manage your calendars now directly from within the SeaMonkey Mail & Newsgroups component.
We have been working closely with the calendar team to make Lightning work as well as possible within SeaMonkey, but we're also sure things can be improved further, and any help is appreciated.
Also, both the SeaMonkey and calendar teams appreciate testing of this Beta and reporting bugs, so we can make your calendaring experience with SeaMonkey and Lightning even better in the future!
Von KaiRo, um 02:18 | Tags: Add-Ons, Lightning, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, SeaMonkey 2 | 8 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
12. Jänner 2010
Weekly Status Report, W01/2010
Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 01/2010 (January 4 - 10, 2010):
With my dad's birthday in the middle of the week, I once again spent most of the week at home with my parents and didn't get around to a whole lot of work, but still tried to start picking up the pace at least somewhat - with a priority on shipping the mail compose freeze fix to Windows users in the 2.0.2 update.
As of right now, I'm back to a normal working schedule, and starting to think more and more about where to go with 2.1, both in terms of features and code work as well as timing. Unfortunately, I don't see the Firefox "Lorentz" story finalized as of now, but timing of the next Gecko/platform releases plays a critical role in our own release planning. I hope to see some light shed on those matters soon.
- Releases:
I prepared a 2.0.2 update this week, containing a very small set of fixes over 2.0.1, most importantly a fix for freezes in composing emails on Windows when the OE Contacts address book is present.
Along with that short-cycled update, the previously planned 2.0.2 release scheduled for early February was renamed to 2.0.3.
Unfortunately, the automated release process didn't perform completely without problems this time, I ran into a timeout with our mini as well as some bustage from a recent infrastructure update and did a patch for the latter.
In the end, I got candidate builds and beta channel updates out on Tuesday evening, and could prepare all website changes by Sunday for a Monday release. - Add-Ons:
We're trying to encourage add-on authors to make their work compatible with SeaMonkey 2.0. Most of the work for that is being done on our side by Philip Chee, e.g. for sending out messages.
We also would like to get an add-ons compatibility center set up on AMO though, and I prepared "SeaMonkey 2.0" wordmark images for that. - SeaMonkey L10n:
After the 2.0 release, we have been pointed to a license problem with packaging dictionaries into language packs, which we worked around in the recent releases, but for the future (beginning with 2.0.3), we're not shipping dictionaries in langpacks to resolve this. We now are only packaging the chrome localization, perfectly matching what Firefox does. This also makes it easier to merge more of the build processes across Mozilla applications in the future.
If you are using language packs and want the matching dictionary installed in the future, fetch it from AMO - which makes it even available if you switch between languages.
The fully localized builds are not affected and still contain the matching dictionary (if available under the MPL from Mozilla repositories), by the way. - Various Discussions:
L10n build infrastructure, close button on tabs, build system porting, AIX port, extension dependencies, future of theme and extension systems, external linkage for mailnews, etc.
With my dad's birthday in the middle of the week, I once again spent most of the week at home with my parents and didn't get around to a whole lot of work, but still tried to start picking up the pace at least somewhat - with a priority on shipping the mail compose freeze fix to Windows users in the 2.0.2 update.
As of right now, I'm back to a normal working schedule, and starting to think more and more about where to go with 2.1, both in terms of features and code work as well as timing. Unfortunately, I don't see the Firefox "Lorentz" story finalized as of now, but timing of the next Gecko/platform releases plays a critical role in our own release planning. I hope to see some light shed on those matters soon.
Von KaiRo, um 12:46 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | 4 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
7. Jänner 2010
Photo Gallery From US Gulf Region Trip
It took me a few weeks as usual, but I now have a reasonable collection of 150 pictures out of about 1200 I took on my US Gulf Region trip, and uploaded those on the website:
Photo gallery: US Gulf Region - November 2009
From rising skyscrapers to swamps, rivers and the Gulf, from museums and monuments to all kinds of stadiums, from live music bars to a Whiskey distillery and a guitar factory, from squirrels to sharks and tigers, I think the pictures show the wide variety of what we saw there - and I'm sure that was only a small part of what the region has to offer.
The hardest part of doing those is always to reduce the vast amount of good pics to a collection that people still are able to view, I hope I managed that task this time again, even though I needed to leave out some other just-as-good ones.
Von KaiRo, um 15:21 | Tags: Gulf Region, photos, Texas, travel, USA, vacation | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
Weekly Status Report, W53/2009
Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 53/2009 (December 28, 2009 - January 3, 2010):
This was another week in which I kept a low profile on work, spending some time with friends and doing some maintenance on my data - all of which are things I hope help turn out things well in this just-started year, which will host a nice anniversary for the SeaMonkey project - we're turning five years old!
- Build Machines:
While cleaning up some part of my email structure for the switch to the new year, I finally filed a few bugs on things I've had on my mind for some time now:
Not shipping dictionaries with langpacks was the outcome of a license debate after the 2.0 release, I also did a patch for that but didn't come around to checking it in yet due to being on and off all the time currently.
Once we know we won't ship releases from a point before the switch of ChatZilla to hg any more, we can also switch releases for that, but 2.0.2 has been short-cycled based on the pre-switch 2.0.1 release.
Some localizers pointed to L10n builds not being generated daily, I need to figure this out soon, possibly together with L10n nightly updates.
Since the recent Parallels upgrade, one of our Mac VMs has been running in the original 2-CPU configuration again and didn't show problems, so we can switch back the remaining ones as well. If that turns out fine, the Parallels experiment might still find a positive outcome.
That could very much influence getting machines for a third SeaMonkey tree next to trunk and 1.9.1, as Parallels might be a viable option again now.
And I requested signing infrastructure though I'm not yet completely sure what exactly we need there. - German L10n:
Just in time for the 10-year anniversary of German Mozilla releases, I dug out the first packages I created for M12 and M13 as well as the (English-only) announcements and put them up on the German SeaMonkey website so other people might indulge in nostalgia as well. - Various Discussions:
Windows 2.0.1 freeze when entering addresses (related to OE contacts), profile manager UI, external linkage for mailnews, Callek coming back to the intarwebs, etc.
This was another week in which I kept a low profile on work, spending some time with friends and doing some maintenance on my data - all of which are things I hope help turn out things well in this just-started year, which will host a nice anniversary for the SeaMonkey project - we're turning five years old!
Von KaiRo, um 14:54 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
1. Jänner 2010
10 Years of German Mozilla releases
Here's is more on my 10 years in the project: Exactly 10 years ago today, on January 1st, 2000, I released the first fully localized Mozilla release or milestone in German.
(I actually posted about its availability 2 hours before midnight my time, but didn't have any place to upload files back then, so I consider the next day the actual release day, when others could upload them somewhere to be accessible to the public.)
Yes, right on the "Y2K day" so many people feared, just 15 days after I posted first on the L10n group and was assigned German localizer, I made a fully localized M12 available to the public - starting a story that is still ongoing, now with a community of German localizers bringing all major Mozilla applications to the largest user base of a locale other than US English, and me still doing the suite part of that, now under the SeaMonkey brand.
To celebrate this anniversary, I added a download page and news story for that release to the German SeaMonkey website today (and the same for M13, which was also still missing).
I almost can't believe I've been serving the German community those builds for 10 years now - and most of that time, I did all the packaging myself, creating language packs and tearing apart en-US binaries to create German one by replacing the L10n files, manually in the beginning, with a script in later years. It's only been now since SeaMonkey 2.0 (including Alpha/Beta) that the Mozilla build machinery has started to produce those for the suite as well and I don't have to run things locally and by myself.
With that, I wish a successful new year ("Ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr" in German) and hope for continuing to serve the community with localized builds for a long time to come!
(I actually posted about its availability 2 hours before midnight my time, but didn't have any place to upload files back then, so I consider the next day the actual release day, when others could upload them somewhere to be accessible to the public.)
Yes, right on the "Y2K day" so many people feared, just 15 days after I posted first on the L10n group and was assigned German localizer, I made a fully localized M12 available to the public - starting a story that is still ongoing, now with a community of German localizers bringing all major Mozilla applications to the largest user base of a locale other than US English, and me still doing the suite part of that, now under the SeaMonkey brand.
To celebrate this anniversary, I added a download page and news story for that release to the German SeaMonkey website today (and the same for M13, which was also still missing).
I almost can't believe I've been serving the German community those builds for 10 years now - and most of that time, I did all the packaging myself, creating language packs and tearing apart en-US binaries to create German one by replacing the L10n files, manually in the beginning, with a script in later years. It's only been now since SeaMonkey 2.0 (including Alpha/Beta) that the Mozilla build machinery has started to produce those for the suite as well and I don't have to run things locally and by myself.
With that, I wish a successful new year ("Ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr" in German) and hope for continuing to serve the community with localized builds for a long time to come!
Von KaiRo, um 00:00 | Tags: German, history, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 3 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
