The roads I take...

Another interesting week has passed, and here's a summary of my SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work items in week 43/2007 (October 22 - 28):

• SeaMonkey Releases:
  I spent some time uploading additional builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.5, and started discussion on 1.1.6, which we probably need to do fast for layout regressions that unfortunately crept into Gecko 1.8.1.8 - this is one reason why we'd need better testing of candidate builds so such regressions can be fixed before instead of after a release!
• SeaMonkey 2 Planning:
  I blogged on my view on SeaMonkey 2 goals this week, I'm also planning on writing up a similar doc for the whole SeaMonkey project soon. Some progress is happening again on a few major open areas for the future of the suite, like preferences rework, feed reader, IPC or mozStorage queries. Additionally, I had an interesting IRC talk about user agent stuff, maybe Flock people are interested in the same dynamic spoofing and evang feature we'd like to see, even Prism could possibly want this (Mozilla Labs are not using a UA containing "Firefox" for this project).
  I think we should start assembling criteria for what we need to release an Alpha of SeaMonkey 2 code, as I think we are coming to a point where such a state might be getting within the range of vision.
• Source L10n:
  I suck. Everything (!) depends (!) on me (!) making an announcement in mozilla.dev.l10n so that localizers can start with SeaMonkey trunk L10n in CVS, but I didn't yet come up with the time to write it. I hope I can do so soon, there are a few things I need to point out there before people can import their stuff.
  On other fronts, the patch for ChatZilla as real extension in SeaMonkey went in, so I can continue to work on CVS-based ChatZilla langpacks.
• German L10n:
  I'm continuing to try to keep trunk as well-working as possible, another set of reviews is pending at the moment.
• Various Discussions:
  ChatZilla-as-extension, release strategies, prefwindow migration, browser notifications, themes and icons, mozilla2, etc.

Currently, big things are going on in many areas regarding the future of the suite, I hope I can report many of them progressing to important milestones or even being completed in the next weeks!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work items I spent time on in week 42/2007 (October 15 - 21):

• SeaMonkey 1.1.5 Release:
  Most of this week's SeaMonkey work on my side went into the SeaMonkey 1.1.5 release, which went public on Friday, almost in sync with Firefox 2.0.0.8 as planned.
  For my own reference, and for other people to be informed, I documented the SeaMonkey release process along with all this work on the Mozilla wiki.
• Source L10n:
  The Mac breakage is fixed by the patch, so repackaging localized nightlies should actually work. Watch for an announcement in mozilla.dev.l10n soon!
• German L10n:
  I'm still playing catch-up with trunk changes, and fixing bugs reported by testers. Some noticed brokenness in password manager in German SeaMonkey trunk builds, but that is as expected as download manager and windows integration breakage, due to those items still being replaced for SeaMonkey2 and the old ones not being migrated to source L10n.
  Additionally, I released SeaMonkey 1.1.5 German builds in sync with the original US English builds.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey 2 goals, auto-update system, chatzilla L10n, window icons, feed reading, etc.

There's a lot of exciting stuff going on, and those who don't know it yet might also want to check the SeaMonkey Trunk Tracker blog by Jens Hatlak, which tells about all kinds of interesting stuff happening on our way to SeaMonkey 2 (and maybe even beyond)!

Last week I realized that there's a world outside this room I'm working from and so I spent quite some time with personal activities, so I cut down my working time roughly what normal workers spend at their jobs - still, here's a (better late then never) summary of my SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work in week 41/2007 (October 8 - 14):

• Branding Cleanup:
  The task of removing Navigator branding from the UI is now done after I got review for the help part and checked that in.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.5 Release:
  We're planning another regular security update to the SeaMonkey 1.1 series with 1.1.5, which is planned to be released at October 18 in parallel with Firefox 2.0.0.8. Candidate builds are up on the FTP server, if QA doesn't turn up anything out of the ordinary, those builds are identical to what we will release. Please help us testing the builds!
• Source L10n:
  As we don't have special machines available for that, I tried to set up our main SeaMonkey tinderboxen for getting localized nightlies through repackaging.
  This worked nicely for Windows and Linux, but the Mac box was broken due to our repackaging Makefile scripts not being able to run correctly in a universal build configuration yet.
• German L10n:
  Another set of Core L10n updates went in, as well as some suite L10n changes German testers found in the first de-nightlies generated by above-mentioned changes. One such problem could be tracked down to be a Core issue, I'm waiting for reviews on its solution. I also could update German READMEs, thanks to Michael for his continued work on those as well as our help documents! Additionally, I made German being included in DOM Inspector builds again after correctly syncing that part of our L10n with the original files again.
  We're keeping German trunk in pretty good shape, even though Filing bugs and getting reviews on every change takes some time, the improvements made due to reviews are usually worth the time spent on them.
• Various Discussions:
  Auto-update system, prefwindow rework, login manager, mailnews development, etc.

As a side note, the Sea-Monkeys in my "think tank" are developing fine, apparently this room is a good place for such animals...

I didn't blog much this week, but things are still progressing nicely. Here's a summary of my SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work in week 40/2007 (October 1 - 7):

• Window Icons:
  Some discussion and improvements on the proposed new window icons have been done, while some might not like the overall direction I think most people appreciate the long overdue refreshing of those icons.
• Branding Cleanup:
  I worked out the rest of the needed changes for removing Navigator branding from the UI and could also get in the editor part, with the help changes waiting for review and checkin.
• Extension Nightlies (venkman):
  The new venkman team wanted to get nightly builds available, so I did set up a box that reports to the MozillaTest tinderbox page currently, and went through some interesting challenges as tinderbox wasn't originally made for building an extension only.
  I found though that it's not that hard to get up with some slight adaptions to tinderbox code. I also found we had some specialized code for uploading specifically the lightning and xforms extensions when built and created some generic code to handle this instead, which also can be used for venkman in my case or any other extension tinderboxes. I filed a bug and patch for those improvements I'm running, I hope we can get this into official tinderbox source.
  Now the last step left is getting a place to upload to, I hope this can be done soon. We'll then have the venkman that gets built by the Makefile build system uploaded, not the makexpi.sh-generated one, so we might need to make the former one include install.js to provide the same experience, but everything else should work nicely, I think.
  If the ChatZilla team wants, we can also do that for them once it's built as a real extension.
• Linux Tinderbox Update:
  The Mozilla build and IT teams have done some work to upgrade our Linux tinderbox to the new reference platform, which magically fixed a huge startup speed regression we saw when switching from xpfe to toolkit, maybe connected with the newer system tools used by CentOS 5 compared to the older version we were running previously. This may increase the software requirements of our trunk nightly (and probably release) builds, but we're just moving to the same level as Firefox3/Minefield trunk builds, so I hope that's ok for in turn still having nightlies even after checkin of some changes that wouldn't build on the older system (because of e.g. too old pango).
  My job onthis was just to sit tight and watch, and make sure I still have access to the new machine after the change
• Source L10n:
  Not much happened there, but the Linux tinderbox change was something I was waiting for before trying to get our nightly tinderboxen to also do locale repackaging.
• German L10n:
  Some Updates to Core L10n were necessary this week, another one is still waiting for review, and I also needed to do a bit of work to keep suite L10n complete - but we're keeping de pretty well in shape for a diverse team and trunk work
• SeaMonkey 2 Core Tracking Bugs:
  I created two bugs for tracking things in Core we still need or would like to see for SeaMonkey 2. While we can track things nicely with blocking flags in our own Bugzilla components or use whiteboard comments on them, we don't have flags and don't want to pollute whiteboards for other products. As "Core", i.e. all the Mozilla infrastructure we share with Firefox, is more and more in a freezing phase for the 1.9 cycle, we need some way to show what changes there are still important for us to happen.
  The Core bugs causing problems for SeaMonkey 2 tracker points to the heavy issues that we absolutely need or which require nasty hacking on our side to get SeaMonkey 2 out at all (i.e. those bugs we probably would consider blocking-seamonkey2+) - no need to get things on this list though that are already Firefox 3 blockers, though.
  Core fixes that would help SeaMonkey 2 development are our list of things we'd really like to see and which possibly can still make the cut (no place for utopic wishes here), but which are not really necessary for us to deliver SeaMonkey 2.
  If you want to get bugs on those lists, please nominate them with a sufficient description of why they are relevant there. Please only add bugs yourself if you are in the core developmer group of SeaMonkey, and even then add good, but short explanations of why they fit on that list.
• Various Discussions:
  "Turbo mode" removal on trunk, auto-update system, profile switching, prefwindow rework, login manager, Classic and new default theme, mailnews development, etc.

I just started working on the first candidate builds for 1.1.5, so everyone who can help testing, please tune into mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey and/or #seamonkey in the next few days!

Another week of hard work has passed, here's a summary of things I did in the SeaMonkey/Mozilla area in week 39/2007 (September 24 - 30):

• Window Icons:
  As I posted here earlier, work has been started on replacing the old Mozilla window icons that were derived from Netscape Communicator with a new set that will make SeaMonkey fit in better with your taskbar, window title bars, desktop and other such areas in current windowing systems.
• Branding Cleanup:
  In the icon thread in the newsgroup, someone mentined that the SeaMonkey browser is still called "Navigator" in many areas, and because of that I opened a bug for removing Navigator branding from the UI and already could check in the first part of it.
• README Update:
  When I saw the Navigator branding in the README files we have, i saw that many areas of those are outdated and did a big overhaul of README files following that.
• Profile Location Change:
  Following the wishes of many contributors and discussion with MoFo legal people, we switched our profile locations back from mozilla.org to Mozilla.
• Source L10n:
  Testing the first SeaMonkey builds created from CVS-based localization, our German testers found the editor L10n missing from those builds, which I could now fix as well, thanks for pointing to that problem!
  I also got some nice changes in for making tinderbox locale repackaging more flexible so that we can make our main SeaMonkey tinderboxen to generate localized builds in the future.
  Additionally, I did some testing of dependent language packs for extensions, and found that everything works as expected. I also did an improved second WIP patch for CVS-based ChatZilla language packs following all that testing.
• German L10n:
  I could keep the German localization for SeaMonkey mostly working all the time and could get the first people to test the repackaged builds - once again, thanks for helping with that!
• MoFo ED Search:
  The Search Committee continued the first round of interviews for a new Mozilla Foundation Executive Director. We have an interesting range of personalities for candidates that will be presented to the community in later stages before the final decision.
• Various Discussions:
  "Turbo mode" removal on trunk, community tinderboxen, profile switching, 1.1.x problems with read-only installs, login manager, shell service, stage reorg, UA string flamewar (again), etc.

Things are surely moving in the right direction for SeaMonkey 2. I think we probably will start figuring out soon what we need to do to be able to go Alpha, and what work we will need to complete for Beta and Final.