The roads I take...

Another week has passed, time for the report on my SeaMonkey work in week 21/2007 (May 21 - 27):

• Upcoming releases:
  The target date stays this upcoming week, May 30, we hope Firefox/Gecko don't need a late respin and new RCs. QA on our candidates looks promising, we probably can release exactly those builds on Wednesday.
• suiterunner switch:
  We're basically ready for the real switch, everything is reviewed, the builds should be usable. We'd like to get people's profiles migrated into a really usable state as well, so we've been waiting for better mailnews account migration before doing the switch, see also my earlier post this week. Some migrator fixes have landed on Saturday, the mailnews part just went in today.
  We have no installer for suiterunner yet, we'll probably get the NSIS-based Windows installer in just in time through module owner approval and "post-mortem" re-review, the former of which we just got today.
  It looks like early this week (around the Gecko 1.9a5 freeze) we'll be able to kill off xpfe-based suite and fully turn to suiterunner instead.
• Suite packaging:
  Creating packages from the suite/installer Makefile I did works just fine (yay for the magic of packager.mk). Windows suiterunner tinderbox builds are already created through that.
• Build system:
  Following the increase of modularity in the build system introduced by Ben Turner from Songbird (yay for that!) this week, I made SeaMonkey the first in-mozilla.og-tree application to use it for getting its Makefile generation out from the monolithic allmakefiles.sh and into a separate makefiles.sh in the application directory.
  Yes, the first. Not even Firefox has made this new step so far.
  I'm sure someone else in this awesome community will work on this for those other apps, hopefully soon.
• Killing wallet:
  Got replacing wallet with satchel to a point where password manager works more or less the same as for Firefox and I run into autocomplete problems for the popup needed by satchel. Also, password manager in mailnews doesn't work yet, we're not throwing errors but missing password saving. It turns out that even Thunderbird is still using wallet for that - which doesn't help
• Other code fixes:
  Remnants of content packs have been removed from non-obsolete code.
• Themes:
  I spent lots of time this week on porting over my EarlyBlue theme to suiterunner, after moving to git for managing their "code". I'm finished with the global/ directory and it seems fairly usable on my suiterunner copy so far.
• Trademark policy:
  Mailed the mozilla.com contact, have not yet received a reply from her though.
• Mozpad:
  Missed the first IRC meeting due to my own stupidity, but read the transcript and helped out the channel with my IRC bot and logs. Hope to do better the upcoming week and make the meeting.
• Various discussions:
  Lots of suiterunner post-landing discussions - we're already working on the next steps to make SeaMonkey a better toolkit citizen and embracing the new possibilites; continued Firefox3 UI discussions (this time mainly about unified content handling UI, which I'd like to see going toolkit-global), build system changes, etc.

An interesting observation for me is that every week I get a quite good list here though I always have a feeling that it should be even longer and I should do even more work for this project.

Other feelings tell me in Bill Shatner style to "get a life" - but then, where can I download one or buy it online, and even more, what would I need it for?

I've not been blogging a lot last week, but that doesn't mean nothing was going on. In fact, lots stuff is happening, and I probably spent more time with code than blogging...

Here's a rough report on my SeaMonkey work in week 20/2007 (May 14 - 20):

• Upcoming releases:
  The target for Firefox release has been pushed out to May 29 due to their new RC for 2.0.0.4, which fixed a Firefox-only problem though. QA on our candidates looks promising, we probably can release exactly those builds next week.
• suiterunner switch:
  After some discussion, download manager has been temporarily fixed to use the old xpfe variant until the new toolkit backend stabilizes somewhat. Profile migrator has landed and works well enough for importing SeaMonkey 1.x profiles, even though it still has some rough edges and will be improved later on.
  I did a patch for a suite/installer Makefile so that we can abandon xpinstall/packager with the switch to suiterunner (just got review and checked it in today), and supplimentary fixes for tinderbox configs in the suiterunner bug, which we also need for the real switch, and are still waiting for review.
  Oh, and we're trying to get an OK from Rob Strong to check in NSIS as-is and integrating his re-review comments "post mortem". Hopefully we'll get such an OK soon, and can provide a Windows installer with suiterunner from the beginning.
  That said, the switch is really near, the major blockers are out of the way.
• code fixes:
  Apart from above mentioned suite/installer and tinderbox config patches for suiterunner, I stumbled over "set as default mail app" missing in Windows suiterunner prefs, and fixed that, did a patch for breakpad integration, investigated remnants of content packs and filed a patch for removing them from non-obsolete code - and started to look into replacing wallet with satchel.
• "Source L10n":
  Temporarily using xpfe download manager regressed this a bit, but we're on track for getting this in suiterunner - the German L10n builds from CVS and mostly works (apart from unresolved dependencies of bug 286110 like download manager or wallet.
• Themes:
  Started porting over my themes to suiterunner. Realized that it might be a good idea to import those into another git repository before going too far on this, so that moving around code gets tracked better than with CVS.
• SeaMonkey Marketing Shop:
  Added a sweatshirt and a shopping bag to http://www.cafepress.com/SeaMonkeySuite.
• SeaMonkey slogan(s):
  Posted Summary of votes and proposals - not sure where to go from here (see newgroup posting fro details).
• Trademark policy:
  Gerv told me his contact, from which he hasn't heard back yet, need to mail that contact directly to show someone's actually interested in that topic.
• Various discussions:
  Took part in the big platform discussion, making clear our support of Mozpad, dropped newsgroup notes about interesting things I learned when glancing at the git mailing list (graft, MinGW port installer), Firefox3 UI (if e.g. places is well-thought-through, we could perhaps discuss adopting it later on), different issues about things we still need/want to improve in suiterunner once it has landed, like shell service, debug UI, plugin finder, and others.

I hope we can flip the big switch and can make suiterunner live this upcoming week!

Another week has passed, here's what I have been up to in this week 19/2007 (May 7 - 13):

• Upcoming release:
  Following new Firefox RCs, moved the SeaMonkey 1.0.9 and 1.1.2 CVS tags and created a second round of candidates. The number of additional fixes is quite low, though.
• suiterunner:
  Various discussions on how to resolve the download manager problem - and we seem to be getting to a temporary solution. Wrote a patch for doing the actual switch, which is coming close now, as I blogged.
• "source L10n":
  Work on getting some traction on bug 377801 - winhooks are probably better replaced by a Firefox-style shell service, filed bug 380347 for that; I did a patch for getting typeaheadfind fixed though and checked that part in.
• SeaMonkey Marketing Shop:
  It is online now at http://www.cafepress.com/SeaMonkeySuite!
• Various discussions:
  Satchel/wallet conversion (still blocked mainly by autocomplete issues), possible improvements for dev watches, L20n issues, P3P removal, among others.

Tasks without progress I (still) want to work on next week:

• SeaMonkey slogan(s):
  This item seems to like its place on that list... To be serious, I still want to do that but I'm still unsure what to do with what we currently have, i.e. how to reach a decision on a first set to use for marketing material.
• Trademark policy:
  Don't stop poking Gerv - got no reply on my last mail yet.

Wow, actually, this week since my last status update went by much faster than I would have expected. Time really ran through my fingers the last few days and I probably have managed to do less stuff than what I personally expected in SeaMonkey terms - but I know I'm always aiming quite high when it comes to personal targets

There are still some things to report from week 18/2007 (April 30 - May 6):

• Upcoming release:
  Tagged 1.0.9 and 1.1.2 in CVS and created first round of candidates. We're now using litmus.m.o instead of the now unavailable testrunner install we had previously, please stop by in #seamonkey if you want to help with smoketests.
• Created SeaMonkey dev watching page
  This is page on dev.seamonkey.at is mainly there to track CVS tags for the releases, but also recent bugzilla and bonsai activity.
• Bookmarks chrome and "source L10n":
  As I reported earlier, bookmarks chrome wasn't moved to suite/ previously and therefore it was one of the last few blockers of "source L10n" for suiterunner. I fixed this via bug 377799 this week, German L10n for its strings is there for testing as well.
  This means that suite source L10n is now close, still there are some minor things to sort out (bug 377801) - and P3P as well as wallet need to be killed. All the big moving around of files has been finished in this area though.
• suiterunner:
  Ongoing discusssions, including removal of the dependency on xpcom_obsolete, which requires turning off sroaming currently until someone re-starts real work on it. Rob Strong has promised to look at the NSIS patch this upcoming week, no other news on the big stuff though - we still badly need someone with XBL, <tree> and nsIDownload knowledge to work on getting download manager to work.
• Various discussions:
  As usual, many small discussions about a broad range of topics, this time including first parts of a PHP implementation for L20n, suiterunner help, mac theming, palm sync fixes for tinderbox, continuing Mozilla2 newsgroup discussions.

Tasks without progress I want to work on next week (yes, I suck, the two of last week are still on the list):

• SeaMonkey slogan(s):
  Need to filter out well-recieved proposals from the newsgroup thread and get some clue how to decide on which one(s) we will be using for marketing material in the immediate future. For the first round of stuff in our new shop, I'm using the www.seamonkey-project.org URL instead of a slogan though, which redirects to our main project site.
• Trademark policy:
  For posting marketing material, we need to have a useful trademark policy. A proposal is in review with MoFo, need to poke Gerv once again about that.
• SeaMonkey Marketing Shop:
  I hope I will get my test order this week, probably will announce the shop then. I'm still thinking about maybe taking a additional dollar per item, so that we may be able to upgrade to a "premium shop" where we could use more than one design per T-shirt type and more custom site design. And if there would be lots of such dollars of income, we could still donate T-shirts to selected coders.