The roads I take...

Another week has passed, and here's a short summary of the SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 47/2007 (November 19 - 25):

• SeaMonkey Releases:
  Started the 1.1.7 release process with candidates and all other required stuff with a target release date of today, but had to pull back and prepare for a respin right when I wanted to push it due to a <canvas> regression. We still hope to release this week.
• Directed Donation Program:
  In collaboration with MoFo, I prepared the SeaMonkey side of the directed donation program recently, pushed it to the public this week, and announced it on my blog and the SeaMonkey website.
• SeaMonkey Website:
  I did rewrite the news parts of the new SeaMonkey Website so that they are driven by a single XML file - this affects the news page, the news section of the main page and the Atom 1.0 feed I added in that process (currently only linked as alternative view to the news page, will link it more publicly soon).
  I also created release notes for 1.1.7 and did some small improvements on other places. And there's a bug report now for changing URLs in SeaMonkey to directly point to the new website.
• SeaMonkey Project Structure:
  Was too busy to drive this forward in that week, will pick it up again soon.
• Smaller SeaMonkey Changes:
  Thanks to Mark Banner, we're now building PalmSync again on trunk, so Palm users on Windows can sync their address books with SeaMonkey trunk.
  Discussions continued about launching 1.1.x branch/release builds of SeaMonkey from read-only installations. Neil has fixed the main issue in 1.1.7, but the issue with launching directly from Mac DMG images is still there, we investigated further how to fix that last case.
  I created a first patch to split error page strings into a generic and a app-specific part, so that SeaMonkey could just override the app-specific file and be able to provide hooks for adding SSL certificate exceptions similarly to Firefox trunk. We found a minor problem, but this looks good.
  After some comments of the first draft, Basil Hashem from Mozilla Corp. created an updated AMO design that should fit SeaMonkey as well as Firefox and the other products well. Due to some discussion around our linking of AMO in the main menu of our new website, some bugs were filed to improve the SeaMonkey AMO experience and getting SeaMonkey users to the right place should also be possible for the next AMO release. I hope this can improve the situation for SeaMonkey Add-Ons users, along with our SeaMonkey 2 rework and whatever improvements they can make to the review process (apparently that's being discussed in the AMO team as a general problem).
• KaiRo.at Bug Bounty Program:
  The Bug Bounty Program I set up from my corporate money is progressing nicely, as Teune van Steeg has now introduced browser notification bars used for blocked extension installs as well as the plugin finder service. By collecting those bounties, Teune has helped us a major step forward in the SeaMonkey 2 user experience. Thanks a lot!
• Source L10n:
  We have 6 localizations in addition to en-US generating nightly builds on trunk, so far this seems to work fine
  I also fixed a security source file to be more friendly to localizers, both for those manually editing them as well as those using tools.
  CVS-based ChatZilla langpacks are stuck a bit, I need to get more input about one unclarity I still have.
• German L10n:
  Some more work to keep up with trunk, but reviews are pending. I started a thread in our newsgroup about how to find a way out of this non-greenness we have most of the time.
• Various Discussions:
  Window icons, Send-mail crash, cert override UI, feed discovery and support, login manager, dictionary licensing, etc.

I start realizing there's a bad thing with releasing as often as we do lately: I spent much more time in the release process for stability, correctness and security updates than working for the future of SeaMonkey. I hope that trend will reverse again soon...

Another week has passed, and here's a short summary of the SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 46/2007 (November 12 - 18):

• SeaMonkey Releases:
  I uploaded even more SeaMonkey 1.1.6 contributed builds.
• SeaMonkey Website:
  The new SeaMonkey Website has been improved in some small cases, and some errors of the switch have been ironed out throughout the week. It looks like everything works well, but we surely will continue to improve this website over the next weeks and months.
• SeaMonkey Project Structure:
  Some more internal discussions in our core team around the SeaMonkey Council, hope to have decisions about this soon.
• Source L10n:
  Finally, source L10n for SeaMonkey is available now, and we added 2 languages last week and 3 more early this week, so that as of my writing, we have 6 localizations in addition to en-US generating build on trunk, including nightlies. Note that password manager, download manager and Windows integration are known to be broken on the localized builds, those will only work once we have new implementations for them and the respective dependencies of bug 286110 are solved.
  The process for CVS-based ChatZilla langpacks is clearing up, some discussions are still left open though, I hope to get more input this week.
• German L10n:
  Some more work to keep up with trunk, also corrected a few errors reported with German trunk SeaMonkey builds.
• Various Discussions:
  Send-mail crash, cert override UI, feed discovery and support, browser notifications, login manager, storage templates (went in finally!), dictionary licensing, auto-update system, etc.

I heard some concern about slow progress on SeaMonkey 2, and that's understandable from a user's point of view, as most users don't see the work that is happening right now for this future release. We hope we can provide an Alpha fairly soon (still no exact timeframe or requirements document for that) and from that preview, we will narrow down fixes until 2.0 final in a more visible pace, I think. Going from SeaMonkey 1.x to 2.0 is a very big step though, one that 2.5 years ago most people in the Mozilla project would not have believed we can even achieve in our new project. We have come a long way on this road and I'm pretty sure people will see the suite thrive with the changes we have done and are still doing in this development cycle. Just be patient a bit longer or backup your data and dare to test a quite experimental nightly builds, and you will see it's definitely worth the wait.
If you can do neither, read my recent Progress and help-wanted on SeaMonkey 2 post to get an impression of where we are going right at this moment. We are moving on, but we need some time to get this stable enough for regular use. Grant us that time and be rewarded with the best Internet suite ever produced.

I'm proud to announce to SeaMonkey localizers that the suite is ready to start into the world of so-called "source L10n", i.e. building localized builds based of files that are all available in our public repositories.

With that, the development trunk of SeaMonkey, which is in a pre-Alpha state for a future SeaMonkey 2, will be localizable using the Core L10n files that are already in CVS. with additional SeaMonkey-specific files added in the suite/ subdirectory and some in the editor/ui/ subdirectory of the respective language directories in the l10n/ CVS repository.

If the SeaMonkey localizer for a language has already CVS access and he is the locale owner or gets authorization from the owner, and if a Firefox localization is already present (and therefore the "core", i.e. dom/, netwerk/, security/ and toolkit/, as well as extensions/reporter are already present for their localization), he can add the SeaMonkey-specific files to the L10n CVS right away. Else, the locale owner or a peer that already has CVS access can do the checkins, and the SeaMonkey localizer should file a bug for CVS access and let the locale owner vouch for him. In any case, the core as mentioned above should be in the tree first. If no core localization is present yet, please follow the Firefox rules for getting the core L10n files in first.

Once your localization gets complete (check that with compare-locales), please file a bug for adding your locale to all-locales for SeaMonkey (in "Mozilla Application Suite > Build Config") and assign it to "kairo@" so I can add you there and repackaging of nightlies will be done.

We don't need any special reviews for bookmarks, start pages or search engines at the moment as we have no special agreements with any providers of such resources. You probably should keep the existing default bookmarks unchanged though, possibly adding a small (!) selection of localized ones - not without asking the link targets if they are OK with that, though.
You also should only change any URLs we point to if you really know what you are doing and have ensured that the target can handle the amount of traffic generated by this change and you are allowed to use any brand that might occur in SeaMonkey due to your changes. This is true for bookmarks, stage pages and search engines as well as any other URLs in SeaMonkey. Be careful with all of those!

For the technical side of search plugins, the only file you need to have in that dir is the list.txt file, please do NOT copy the en-US plugins themselves, if the list.txt points to a plugin not existing in your locale but in en-US, the plugin from en-US will be packaged automatically. If you add plugins for local search providers, you need to add the base name of the files in list.txt and provide a .src and .png file for the search plugin, using the "old" sherlock format as used by mycroft.mozdev.org. Note that all icons need to be PNG, not GIF or something else, as our localization process only picks up .png files.

As we are still in pre-Alpha with this SeaMonkey development cycle, we have not yet figured out exactly how we will deal with releases, I hope I can give a better picture of that when we are nearing Alpha. What we know, as that we'll probably go into the final localization freeze for or shortly after Beta, but we don't know yet when this will exactly be.

Once a locale has been added to all-locales, you'll notice the SeaMonkey nightly build machines appearing on the respective Mozilla-l10n-* tinderbox waterfall page and nightly builds generated when those columns there are green. Those nightly builds will appear in the latest-trunk FTP directory and should be usable to a big part.

Warning: We know of some features that are still broken in localized builds at the moment, those are all marked as dependencies of the source L10n bug: Download manager and password manager windows do not work, as well as system integration hooks (on Windows) - we are working on replacing the old implementations of those with newer ones and therefore did not enable the old code to work with source L10n.

I hope we can improve quality and availability of SeaMonkey localizations with this step, so that SeaMonkey 2 will be an even better suite product than any other such all-in-one application before.

Here's a summary of my SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work items in week 45/2007 (November 5 - 11):

• SeaMonkey Releases:
  SeaMonkey 1.1.6 was released on Monday, I continued uploading contributed builds throughout the week.
• SeaMonkey Website:
  I spent another bunch of time on getting the new Website finalized to be our primary web appearance, which we switched to on late Sunday finally.
• SeaMonkey Project Structure:
  Internal discussions in a core team around the SeaMonkey Council continue, we hope to get something about our restructuring into the public soon.
• Source L10n:
  My SeaMonkey L10n announcement is written, but I still want some signoff by the Mozilla L10n lead. Wait to read more about this soon.
  The L10n review for CVS-based ChatZilla langpacksis a bit unclear to me, I need to discuss that a bit further with Axel.
• German L10n:
  FF3beta1 should really be able to ship in German, and SeaMonkey trunk builds were also kept up-to-date.
• Various Discussions:
  Cert override UI, feed discovery, browser notifications, login manager, storage templates, dictionary licensing, auto-update system, etc.

As you might have seen, the new SeaMonkey website features a "Powered by Mozilla" logo - we are proud to be part of this amazing project and glad to be able to advertise our Mozilla heritage and core (and not some other brand). I still love the old theme that I think is now as accurate as ever for the Mozilla project: "hack - this technology could fall into the right hands"

Here's a summary of my SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work items in week 44/2007 (October 29 - November 4):

• SeaMonkey Releases:
  Most of this week's work went into creating yet another 1.1.x release, as some layout glitches were found in the bigger list of fixes that went into Gecko 1.8.1.8 and a 1.8.1.9 was issued to fix those. Based on that, MoCo released Firefox 2.0.0.9 and we are releasing SeaMonkey 1.1.6 today to pull in the same fixes.
  I also created release notes for this and the previous 1.1.5 release, taking over from Chris, who unfortunately has less time to donate to the project.
• SeaMonkey Project Structure:
  We spent some time starting internal discussions about possible organizational restructuring in the SeaMonkey project. After more than 3 years of existence of this project, some people's focus has shifted to being more or less active, and we need to think about how to reflect that in our organization. We need to keep the discussions a bit internal until we see this clearer ourselves, but expect to hear more from that soon (nothing bad, just the natural flow of things).
• Source L10n:
  I still haven't made my SeaMonkey L10n announcement, but with the new release out of the way, I hope I can do it soon now.
  I have done some work on CVS-based ChatZilla langpacks, and that even got a review from the ChatZilla side already, I hope to get the L10n review as well soon so we can move forward on this really soon now.
• German L10n:
  We should have Core trunk up-to-date again, right in time that FF3beta1 can ship even in German, and SeaMonkey trunk builds should be available in German again as well - with the usual known problems due to unfinished SeaMonkey2 work.
• Various Discussions:
  Feed discovery, link toolbar, browser notifications, toolbar customization, storage templates, dictionary licensing, auto-update system, etc.

Some people in the SeaMonkey community who were opposed to Firefox for a long time seem to realize that it is indeed a nice browser. I concur with that, but SeaMonkey is still much more than that: We offer a browser, mail and newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC client and web developer tools all in one application. While Firefox is a good choice for novices who only need a browser, I think SeaMonkey is still the better choice for advanced users, web developers and corporate users, and we're trying to make it fit those audiences even better in the 2.0 version, including some ideas and even more technology we can share with Firefox, but still making our software a distinct, different product with a long heritage and a hopefully even longer future.