The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related items I still did come around to work on in week 34/2007 (August 20 - 26):

• Website work:
  After finally Mozilla suite users got a reworked start page that tells them their product is outdated and they should upgrade (to Firefox and Thunderbird, SeaMonkey is only mentioned in a small paragraph at the bottom and only visible after scrolling on most screens), some SeaMonkey users complained they got to see that page as they are still using profiles they had in use with the suite and never changed this start page.
  If fixed this with a JS redirect to the SeaMonkey start page.
  
  That reminded me of an issue I had in mind for a long time, and I worked out a proposal for a new SeaMonkey start page that should be nicer and more helpful to most users.
  
  Finally, I picked up the plans to create a separate SeaMonkey project website and spend days of work only on this.
  The current state is now available for preview as well (this is still a work in progress).
  
  I'd be happy about feedback - please post this in the development newsgroup rather than here on the blog though.
• Code Reviews:
  I reviewed an interesting way of fixing accesskeys in error console and one more patch for the debugQA extension.
• Various Discussions:
  PrintUtils, issues and joy surrounding venkman/chatzilla and their maintainers, notification bars, XUL vs. HTML, www.mozilla.org future, SeaMonkey window icons, etc.

The website work stole almost all my time, so I was a bit slow on all kinds of other things. Sorry if I may not have come around to do some other things - I hope I'll be able to come back to those once the new website nears even more a state with which I as well as other community members will be satisfied.

This status update is rather short, as I said previously, I spent Monday to Wednesday at home and mostly away from computers (see IRL://at/home/ ).
Additionally, I worked a bit on my web CMS/community system, automatically creating web-based documentation from source code comments - I hope that'll make further development work easier.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related items I still did come around to work on in week 33/2007 (August 13 - 19):

• Places History:
  As mentioned here a few days ago, I checked in the possibility build the new "places" backend for history in SeaMonkey with a special configure flag. As the UI doesn't work completely with this yet, we can turn this on by default yet.
• Code Reviews:
  I reviewed a small string addition to help Lightning integration. Additionally, I swallowed the (for me) bitter pill and read through python code to review improvements of the new compare-locales script so that it works with more than just Firefox and Thunderbird.
  I also looked into reviewing the patches to get profile switching to work again from a running SeaMonkey, but I think we still have a few open items to discuss there, even if the patches all meet the main objective of the bug.
• Infrastructure (tinderbox, AUS, website)
  As the Mozilla project converts to new Windows build machines built upon MozillaBuild (MSYS) and VC8 SP1, I filed a bug to also move community machines, including the SeaMonkey one, to this reference platform.
  A bug for switching to new Linux images does exist already, and I hope hope we'll get a box for L10n builds as well.
  On a different front, a machine for automatic updates of community products has been set up, once everything works for Sunbird, we'll look into getting it ready for SeaMonkey as well.
  After a long time, I've once again looked into setting up seamonkey-project.org as a separate website domain (when we do this, hosting will still be done by Mozilla, we need no other offers there). I still need to really get familiar with the website build system we are provided with and find out what kind of design would fit us best, but I have "something" working locally for testing. www.mozilla.org still works fine for us basically, though, so there's no real pressure on that, but at some point we'll probably arrive there.
• L20n:
  While that proposed new framework for localization is cool, there's not much discussion or work going on around it, which is sad. I tried to get at least discussions going again this week by posting to newsgroups, my blog and mailing a few peers.
• Various Discussions:
  IPC, venkman chrome errors and making it an extension, killing usage of old chromereg compatibility, killing old chromereg, suite start page changes, etc.

In other news, I did finally find the time to request a new passport and should get it this week, so that I'll even be able to travel to the US again. I hope I can visit the Mozilla headquarters at Mountain View some time in the near future.

Sorry for being very late with my status update from last week this time. I've taken some days more or less off from work from Saturday to Wednesday evening and spent them at home with my parents, in municipality and bank offices to get a new passport and get my finances better in order, and at my brother's 25th birthday party.

Still, better late than never, here's my summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I did in week 32/2007 (August 6 - 12):

• Releases:
  Uploaded some more builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.4, thanks to all contributors providing those!
• German L10n:
  I went into the next incarnations of the security and dom L10n sync patches, I think we're nearing a usable state of both.
  We're currently trying to get a newsgroup for German L10n, I hope it'll be created very soon.
• Source L10n:
  I filed a bug to get a machine for doing langpacks and L10n repackaging for SeaMonkey, which currently is the major blocker to get locales into CVS in a testing mode.
• openURL():
  As this sounded like something that should have happened for a long time, I moved Philip's relatively generic function to open URLs from any Mozilla-based app from extensions.js to contentAreaUtils.js, so that it can be used by other consumers than Extension Manager.
  I hope such other consumers will be added soon.
• KaiRo.at Bug Bounty Program:
  Finally could disclose this project and announced it on my blog.
  Even in the first days, some progress could be seen on the first items on the program's list.
• Small work:
  I finally got my image region reftest into the tree that I've blogged on some weeks ago.
  Also unbitrotted the places history switch patch which will allow people doing builds themselves to easily test the new history backend in SeaMonkey.
• Various Discussions:
  Current and future build tools, automatic update system,etc.

I hope to provide this week's status update on-time again, lately it's becoming somewhat of a bad habit for me to provide those updates late, I'm trying to not keep this one.

I could get done some interesting things done this week - here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related issues I worked on in week 31/2007 (July 30 - August 5):

• Releases:
  Your probably read about it, we managed to fix a few nasty security vulnerabilities with our SeaMonkey 1.1.4 release, I spent lots of time on that - with great help from the community!
• Passwordmanager conversion:
  We had lots of talk about this - we want to turn to toolkit's login manager, but mailnews still needs wallet, mainly because login manager misses an interface it needs.
  Because the wallet password manager and login manager listen to the same preference, we've had two prompts for saving passwords come up on logging into websites, so we needed to disable building most of login manager again for the time being.
• Themes and RTL support:
  Along with the wallet replacement work, the issue of RTL support came up in the form of browser autocomplete and we came into a more general RTL discussion along with that. It would be nice to support RTL languages better in SeaMonkey, which will need some modifications to the remaining parts of the Classic theme - ideally even to Modern, but Classic comes first. Any help on that would be appreciated!
  Additionally, I once again did update my EarlyBlue theme to work with the current trunk of SeaMonkey.
• Cleanup of old xpfe code:
  Steffen Wilberg has noted that xpinstall/standalone had been abandoned for a few years already, so I removed it from the CVS repository.
• German L10n:
  Finally got the editor L10n sync checked in, as well as some security string updates in core triggered by our discussion for German.
• Lightning Calendar:
  As I mentioned earlier, I turned on Lightning for SeaMonkey this week. Be sure to read my blog post about it if you're interested in that topic.
• Statistics:
  I worked on and posted a few statistics here on the blog, I hope they gave some good insights about what is going on
• (Undisclosed Project):
  After some further work on it, my SeaMonkey-related business project is ready for an announcement, which will follow this post within hours.
• Various Discussions:
  Current and future build tools, FF3 download manager UI, automatic update system, Vista compatibility, etc.

I tied to increase the frequency of blog posts to not only have status reports - I hope this is helpful even in the holiday season. Of course, one never knows about that...