The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 51/2010 (December 20 - 26, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  Dustin from Mozilla RelEng stepped in finding a fix for our sqlite/threading issue with building nightlies, I applied that, and it works perfectly, so we do have nightlies for both our branches again.
  The .nl machine graph post failures have been fixed by Mozilla IT, I did some work on 64bit graph posting failures but there we are waiting for IT right now, probably taking longer due to the holidays.
• Places:
  Did some more work on porting async star button and replied on some review comments, but need to do a bit more work here.
• Various Discussions:
  Ongoing graphics driver instabilities, possibly being on to a fix for mobile woes, thoughts on my next experimental projects, donation page improvements, SM Dev Mtg reimbursements, Thunderbird prefs, etc.

Most of this week was filled with me taking time offline and celebrating Christmas with my parents, grandparents, brother, etc. - it's always good to spend some time with family and get your mind off work for a change (as much as that works), and I'll continue to take some time off in the next weeks.

With that, I hope you had or have some calm time yourself and can harness some energy to put into projects that help a lot of people - like Mozilla - in the upcoming year!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 50/2010 (December 13 - 19, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  Following our recent upgrade to buildbot 0.8, I did a few runs of additional syncing with the Firefox configs, among others things fixing broken L10n builds and picking up same-ID always-working nightlies. Or, the latter is at least the theory, as this code conflicts slightly with our setup and makes us not build nightlies at all right now.
  I'll continue to look into this issue and work together with Mozilla RelEng to find a fix - the same is true for 64bit graph posting failures and .nl machine graph post failures that were uncovered by the switch (were silently failing before).
  As the nightly build process will look at those for success now, I've also switched 2.0 dep builds to static to match how we're building nightlies there.
  In addition, I continued work on omnijar for SeaMonkey, I now have a patch that's known to work even for L10n repacks.
• (Tahoe) Data Manager:
  A huge batch of Data Manager patches got reviews for SeaMonkey and checked in this week: listing domains for specific data types, adding permissions, using DEL for setting permissions back to default, using ESC to escape from the forget panel, pointing all UI to Data Manager and IDN handlingbring the built-in version up to the same state (actually with slight improvements) as the 1.3 add-on available from AMO.
  I've also created a patch already for switching to correct tab when displaying specific data type, I might ship an add-on with that and improvements from review soon.
• Places:
  I worked on getting changes from the recent places branch merge to work on SeaMonkey - patches for async star button and a bookmark roots locking issue are up for review.
• German L10n:
  Once more I updated the German L10n, bringing it to a green state for a bit, but there's already some slight additional work up again.
• Various Discussions:
  Ongoing graphics driver instabilities, trying to get a fix for mobile woes, thoughts on my next experimental projects, leaktest suite, backporting old build warnings, possible personal future, donation page improvements, SM Dev Mtg reimbursements, Post-FF4 branch organization, disabling of WebSockets, etc.

I feel like I'm blogging way too rarely recently, but a few things I have in my head are not ready for making public yet, even though great things are forming. With all that thinking and trying to get those things done that I want to get done in SeaMonkey before I concentrate more on making those other ideas hit reality at some point, I just realized that Christmas is ringing the door bell though I'm not yet ready for it. Does anyone have a few packets of time (s)he could donate to me to get this all balanced a bit better?

Actually, I imagine that person being somewhat well-fed, coated in red, riding along here in a sleigh that is flying up through the air, pulled by a bunch of magic reindeer and silently dropping those packages at night...

To everyone celebrating this pagan event that our religion adopted to remember the birth of Christ and bring love to neighbors and family - Merry Christmas!
To all others getting some time off - Happy Holidays!
To anyone else - Have a good time while I'll take some time off to celebrate, rest and have fun myself!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 49/2010 (December 06 - 12, 2010):

• Releases:
  I did most of the final step of releasing 2.0.11, including pushing to mirrors, creating relnotes, updating the website and sending the announcement. Still, things are better documented now and Callek did a good part of the creation of builds - and he now should have all needed access to do it on his own in the future.
• SeaMonkey Website:
  In addition to the changes for the release, I also linked in the new donation page that now resides on donate.mozilla.org with other Mozilla Foundation donation pages - and offers more than just Paypal payments.
• Build Infrastructure:
  I remembered this week that we needed ot turn on check tests on Linux64 again, and when I did that, it finally worked fine.
  On Saturday, I did put a real lot of work into upgrading our buildmaster to buildbot 0.8, which should be done now. If you notice any problems, please file bugs and mark them dependent on this one.
  Once that was done, I noticed that posting data to the graph server failed on Linux due to missing simplejson, and I fixed that as well.
  Following that, I spent a lot of time on Sunday trying to figure out how we could switch SeaMonkey to omnijar and have a working patch up though I'll need to put a bit more work into some testing and some edges.
• Security Update Warning:
  Some weeks ago, when I had discussions once again with people who decided to switch off security updates, I came up with the idea of implementing a warning for old builds when updates are disabled - this week I created a patch and it promtly got reviews, so it's in the trunk tree already. I'd love to see this on branch, but unfortunately it adds strings, and we don't allow that on stable branches.
  In addition, I think others should do that as well and filed a bug to do this in Firefox.
• Site-specific Zoom:
  I did some more work on my patch for site-specific zoom in SeaMonkey this week, and finally got it to a state that passed reviews, so I could land it on trunk. Nicely, we're sharing more code with Firefox in toolkit with that, and the site-specific preferences this uses are displayed in Data Manager.
• (Tahoe) Data Manager:
  Talking of Data Manager, I landed the icon and view loading patches on SeaMonkey trunk after they got positive reviews.
• Places:
  As arrow panels have landed now for enough that we can do that, I created a patch for making the bookmarks panel an arrow panel, and it got review very fast, so that's live on trunk as well already - unfortunately, I don't see it myself as arrow panels are not implemented on Linux yet.
• German L10n:
  I did a number of updates to sync the German localization with SeaMonkey trunk this week as well, to round things up.
• Various Discussions:
  Life in SeaMonkey, ongoing graphics driver instabilities, mobile woes and possibilities, thoughts on my next experimental projects, bug resolutions, use of blocking flags in Firefox planning, leaktest suite, etc.

In addition to normal work, I took part in the SeaMonkey Triage Week in areas I know well, and could help separating those bugs that don't need real work from those that will need a developer looking into them more deeply. This task is really similar to triage in medical emergency situations, that's why it shares the name - just that our "patients" (bugs) can sit around for a long time without their state changing. Still, some heal themselves with time, can't be cured or turn out to be hypochondriacs or other states a developer can't really help with - even bugs that are not ours. And then there are requests for enhancements we will not work on (those might still be good as add-ons). I helped with cases of all those - and all together, about 300 bugs have been touched in triage, 200 of them have been resolved in some way, about 30 moved to other products where they fit better (Toolkit, Core, MailNews Core). Thanks to everyone who helped there!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 48/2010 (November 29 - December 05, 2010):

• Releases:
  I helped Callek to bring the 2.0.11 process further along, pushed that one to the beta channel and added the new versions to the crash-stats server.
• Build Infrastructure:
  I filed a bug on Linux leak test hangs which might be connected to some online/offline weirdness I'm seeing in my own builds, as investigation showed that failure happened with a regression window that contains a tweak to the offline detection stuff. We don't have a real clue of what's up yet, though - help wanted!
• Places:
  I updated the patch on Firefox places cleanup, I hope this version will pass reviews.
  I also filed a bug for retrieving the best available icon for a domain as my Data Manager is not the only place that could need something like that, and this rather complicated logic should be in a generic place. This will probably only happen after Mozilla 2.0, though.
• (Tahoe) Data Manager:
  The Tahoe Data Manager add-on version 1.3 is now public on AMO, with an interesting set of improvements over previous versions. All those are up for review on the SeaMonkey side as well.
• Site-specific Zoom:
  I almost dropped my work on site-specific zoom before I picked it up again, but new review comments are still not too encouraging to put a lot of work into this patch - still, they're constructive, so let's see if we can find some common ground on this.
• SeaMonkey Internals:
  We got a new mailing list set up to talk organizational stuff that can't be public yet, but should have the core of the community involved.
  Some people of us also discussed a new patch that can't be public just yet.
  In realted news, I published the new review rules for SeaMonkey that we had discussed and decided in Vienna.
• Various Discussions:
  Website updates, group/list spam, mobile woes and possibilities, ongoing graphics driver instabilities, hiding Firefox main browser chrome when displaying in-content UI, build machines, etc.

Please note that our SeaMonkey Triage Week has just started, please help us there to resolve bugs that developers can't work on as they can't be reproduced, have not enough information for being reproduced (and being able to see it himself in some way it paramount for a developer to fix a problem), as well as sort out reports that are not (our) bugs, or can't/won't be fixed. If we manage to do that, it will be way easier for (potential) developers to spot issues that need someone to work on, so investing your time and helping there does make a difference!

Also, there should be some people around on IRC almost all the time to help you get up to speed to be able to help - all you need is a recent SeaMonkey build (ideally a nightly build) and some time!