The roads I take...
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27. Februar 2008
Weekly Status Report, W08/2008
- FOSDEM:
As reported earlier this week, I spent a quite interesting weekend at FOSDEM - the happenings page has links to all blog posts, photos, and slides from the Mozilla people who were there this weekend.
During the whole week before, I spent a large amount of time preparing my talk about "Community Project Organization and SeaMonkey 2" - I hope that work resulted in an interesting hour on Sunday. The calendar folks at least told me they're facing the same challenges in project organization, and Gerv states that bmo reorg scripts are now being written.
Chatting with people on FOSDEM about various topics surrounding SeaMonkey was quite interesting, looks like SUMO people are open for cooperation on improving SeaMonkey support, the calendar team is looking forward to see Lightning in SeaMonkey (though they probably are just as short on time and developer force as us), SeaMonkey users are very much looking forward to SeaMonkey 2, and localizers to full source L10n, just to name a few things.
Adrianer from the Polish team brought up some issues with nightly updates, we'll need to take a closer look on those. - Preferences work:
Sanitize got partial reviews this week and seems to be nearing checkin readiness, the porting the application panel patch triggered more review comments that need to be addressed, same for appearance prefs and ChatZilla integration (which probably also needs some talk to the reviewer to explain some changes he doesn't fully understand yet).
I'm currently (post-FOSDEM) picking up all that work again. - German L10n:
Fixed de for the pre-FF3b4 L10n updates, and kept SeaMonkey up-to-date as usual. - Various Discussions:
California traveling, password manager (core fixes now reviewed!), toolbar customization (pending core fixes), overlay handling (pending core problem/fix), shell service, Mozilla Messaging, etc.
The FOSDEM weekend was great, the only real problem was that two days are just too short to fit all those interesting talk and chatting with all the interesting people in addition to that. I couldn't even get around to actually bowl at our Saturday evening 10-years-anniversary party at the bowling center, having so many great conversations. I once read about the KDE people doing a hack week, maybe we should think about sometime doing a hack & meet week in such a style...
Von KaiRo, um 15:51 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 0
25. Februar 2008
Back from FOSDEM 2008
It's been a really good conference, I talked to a lot of Mozilla people about lots of interesting topics, even got into a short talk about Mozilla and KDE with a few KDE devs (they seem to have the same problem as us - they'd like better integration but lack the time to look into it), I listened to a bunch of interesting talks, hopefully could deliver such a talk as well, and, most importantly, met a nice crowd of cool people. Oh, sure, and celebrated 10 years of www.mozilla.org (website launched February 23, 1998)!
It's been a densely packed weekend, and I didn't even come around to see everything I would have liked to or talk to everyone I'd hoped to...
Some links: Martin has put up photos on Flickr, and my talk is up on http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2008/ - I hope more photos and slides will get linked somewhere from our FOSDEM2008 mozillawiki page.
With that, I'll head back to work to get all the things done I didn't come around to look into last week, and probably even to get some sleep.
I'm looking forward to the next FOSDEM!
Von KaiRo, um 00:54 | Tags: FOSDEM, Mozilla, travel | 3 Kommentare | TrackBack: 2
22. Februar 2008
On The Road
I'm looking forward to both those trips - but for this weekend I'll be concentrating on FOSDEM
Von KaiRo, um 13:43 | Tags: California, FOSDEM, Mountain View, Mozilla, SF Bay Area, travel | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 0
20. Februar 2008
Weekly Status Report, W07/2008
- Preferences work:
I iterated through review comments on sanitize (clear private data), and started working on a part of appearance prefs, splitting content preferences from the main pane, but integrating UI language switching into that main panel instead (also worked on the ChatZilla changes needed along with that.
Additionally, I started porting the application preferences panel from Firefox to SeaMonkey, which turned out to be really heavy work, as it needed (and still needs) lots of rework due to review comments, a few times driving me into frustration - but I keep recovering and picking up work again. - FOSDEM:
As you probably already know, I'll be in Brussels this upcoming weekend, spending time in the Mozilla developer room at the FOSDEM conference, chatting with other Mozillians, listening to their talks and giving my own talk, titled "And the beast shall come forth..." about community project organization and SeaMonkey 2.
I've spent some times last week preparing this talk, doing more this week to make it short enough to fit in the given time slot. - Unicode … Ellipsis:
As the core toolkit has been switching from triple-dots to the unicode ellipsis in UI, even for menu entries ending in the famous three dots, I've filed and checked in a patch to do the same for SeaMonkey this week so that we stay consistent with the core.
Note to localizers: No semantic changes here, so the IDs stayed as they were, it's your choice to follow that change or not, but you should stay consistent with the what's being done for toolkit/core in your language. - Website, Bugzilla:
Two unrelated notes about small issues on two websites:
After a server upgrade this week, we saw internal server errors on the SeaMonkey website, the configuration was missing an option that has been added again now.
And as noted in a previous blog entry, we now have a SeaMonkey description and logo for the "Mozilla Application Suite" product on the bugzilla.mozilla.org bug entry pages. - Source L10n:
Polish has been added as the 12th language supported on SeaMonkey trunk, Czech has added ChatZilla support. - German L10n:
Not many changes this week for localizers, as Firefox is pretty much frozen, but kept the German core and SeaMonkey trees green. - Various Discussions:
California traveling, password manager (pending core fixes), toolbar customization (pending core fixes), JS 1.7 in XBL (done core fix!), overlay handling (pending core problem/fix), wrong Cu.import error reporting, full zoom changes, sidebar directories, mac menu icons and -moz-image-region (core problem), uncaught crashes, etc.
I hope to see at least some of you this weekend in Brussels and hope to meet more of you in April when I'll be doing a trip to California - it now looks like we'll be visiting not only the San Francisco Bay Area, but will go for some long drives and go to Las Vegas and Los Angeles as well, as the friend of mine who joins me for this trip is eager to see as much as possible on his first US vacation. I just need to find some reasons now why I need to visit those other cities for business, so that financial authorities over here will still believe this is a business trip...
In any case, I'm looking forward to meet as many Mozillians as possible in Brussels and California!
Von KaiRo, um 15:38 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 0
My Take on Mozilla Messaging and SeaMonkey
The big news of this week is Mozilla Messaging being launched as the effort that should parallel Mozilla Corporation's Firefox effort in the email and messaging area by further developing Thunderbird.
The question this might raise with a few people around the Mozilla community is what this means to the SeaMonkey project, which shares a substantial amount of code with Thunderbird in the mail and news area.
My opinion on that is that it's cool that we now have a partner in mail and news development who takes messaging much more serious than Mozilla Corporation ever could. Mozilla Messaging does not emphasize a browser over all other products, it actually doesn't even develop a browser. This makes us sure we have an additional ally in the area of Mozilla(-based) applications that are looking beyond the browser. Even more, putting full-time developers, new ideas and visions behind the Thunderbird project might gives the mail/news code a new future and puts more development force behind that than what the SeaMonkey project and some assorted other volunteers could provide so far.
As the SeaMonkey vision is - in my eyes - to have "the Internet" as the center for browsing, messaging and more on your desktop (in our case as a single, integrated application), I'm really happy about Mozilla Messaging emphasizing that Mozilla can actually provide all that - and not "only" a damn good browser.
I (and hopefully all of my colleagues on both sides) will try to get as much cooperation between Mozilla Messaging and the SeaMonkey project as possible, so that we can drive forward both our products, which both have their respective place on their markets, as much as possible.
I'm convinced we both can profit from each other and the Mozilla mission of choice on the Internet has always shown that our community is really good at providing nothing less than excellence in fulfilling that mission.
Von KaiRo, um 03:17 | Tags: Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird | 2 Kommentare | TrackBack: 1
17. Februar 2008
3 Million (Tracked) SeaMonkey Downloads!
Here's a per-release graph:
As with my last blog post on that topic, those numbers are once again only from the main three links we have, which run through download.mozilla.org (US English Win/Linux installers and Mac disk image) - other builds, including localizations are excluded, so the real number would probably be even higher (given that FF reports 50% of downloads being localized builds)...
Von KaiRo, um 19:41 | Tags: Mozilla, release, SeaMonkey, stats | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 1
16. Februar 2008
Bay Area Travel Tips?
My main focus on that trip is Mozilla (out of interest of course, but also so that it counts as a business trip for financial authorities), so I'd be happy to talk to Mozilla people to about organizational, platform and SeaMonkey stuff - but probably also any other topics surrounding our great community.
Of course, I'd like to learn about the attractions of that part of California as well (though I already have been to a few of them about 13 years ago on a family vacation), so if you can tell me some must-sees, I'm happy about those as well - esp. the insider tips
If there are any special events in that timeframe, I'd also like to know about them - Mozilla events of course, but also if there's some Country Music (which I really love) or sports event of interest - I'll probably travel with a first-time-US-visitor who is a big American Football fan (I know, out of season, so bad time for that) and also likes Basketball, Baseball and such stuff, so it would be good to find some interesting stuff for him as well (his day job is something like talking hexadecimal or such, he calls that programming car control units).
I'd also love to know about hotels you could recommend in that area, I'd like to pre-book at least parts of my stay in a hotel, either via my travel agency or some insider knowledge from over there
Of course, if you want to meet me there, I'd like to know as well!
So, please help with with any tips you have for me - either comment here, contact me on IRC ("KaiRo") or via email (kairo@kairo.at).
Thanks a lot - and I hope to meet you if you're in that area at the same time!
Von KaiRo, um 22:39 | Tags: Mountain View, Mozilla, SF Bay Area, travel | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
Small Steps (or: still no bmo reorg)
Because of this, Bugzilla still largely sucks for SeaMonkey due to wrong components and even a wrong product name being used.
A small step towards correcting this has been done now though (thanks to justdave!): The "Enter Bug" product selection describes "Mozilla Application Suite" as SeaMonkey and uses the SeaMonkey logo for it.
I hope this will enable newbies to Bugzilla to at least find the right product for filing their SeaMonkey bugs under.
And maybe, some time in the future, there is still hope for getting a real bmo reorg done so that the product/components structure fits reality better. I won't stop to hope for better times...
Von KaiRo, um 00:02 | Tags: Bugzilla, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
15. Februar 2008
Weekly Status Report, W06/2008
- Preferences work:
I filed a bug for and implemented a patch for sanitize (clear private data) in SeaMonkey, which took quite some time but was my first work with the new preferences panel (more to come). I've long disliked the emptiness of the main "Privacy & Security" panel in SeaMonkey's preferences, finally found something that really fits there and created a patch for it.
To everyone who wants to help SeaMonkey: The preference migration has some low-hanging fruit, but it's easy to run into things that aren't that easy to figure out, unfortunately. - Places support:
I could check in the removal of browser dependencies in toolkit places last week. - Release work - SeaMonkey 1.1.8:
I did lots of work on the SeaMonkey 1.1.8 release, which is our newest stable version, featuring numerous security and stability fixes. - German L10n:
We kept up toolkit ready for FF3b3, also kept SeaMonkey trunk green. - Various Discussions:
new prefwindow, test boxen for SeaMonkey, bugs for help updates, KDE (non-)integration, etc.
I've been quite busy in the last days with working on even more preference panel stuff (and running into multiple problems with core along that), that's why this update is that late. Sorry, but I'll try to make that up with goodies in SeaMonkey trunk preferences!
Von KaiRo, um 01:05 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
8. Februar 2008
A Successful & Sanitized Launch Day
The thrill of launching that release was increased by the thrill of watching a successful Space Shuttle launch on the same day, which was even more thrilling because of the low probability of favorable weather that forecasts had given for today. Nice to see Atlantis finally up on orbit, making the Space Station really international with the European "Columbus" laboratory module.
And as that all wouldn't have been enough, I finally took up the challenge to go a bit more into code than usual, and at the same time do away with the striking emptiness of the main "Privacy & Security" pref panel in SeaMonkey. We were missing the "sanitize" feature (a.k.a. "Clear Private Data") in our suite, which seemed to fit perfectly into that empty space in my opinion - so I took a deep look into Firefox code and ported that feature to SeaMonkey. The patch ended up pretty large, but consisting mostly of code copied from Firefox, even from code that hasn't yet landed and probably won't even land for FF3! After a few hours of concentrated work, it looked all good to me - but knowing Neil, I'm pretty sure it will go through a number of iterations to fix his review comments.
In any case, this is is very likely another feature we will be able to add for SeaMonkey 2.
Having not done (much) of real Mozilla code, JS modules or XPCOM components before, I can tell anyone who doesn't dare to try that it's not that hard - especially when you can learn how things work by doing such code porting. Just Try It™!
Von KaiRo, um 02:36 | Tags: ISS, Mozilla, NASA, release, SeaMonkey, SeaMonkey 2, Shuttle | 2 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0
5. Februar 2008
Weekly Status Report, W05/2008
- Tinderbox changes:
For one thing, the SeaMonkey waterfall pages finally have introduction paragraphs that resemble current state of the builds shown there.
Additionally, we had an interesting orange phase of our unit testr tinderbox this week, and it turned out that all tinderboxen for all products still tried to run all tests with the Modern theme - even for applications that don't have it (which did fall back to their default). I changed tinderbox to leave the default theme instead (unless it's running Mozilla suite or SeaMonkey 1.1.x, where we stay with Modern for consistent test numbers). - Places support:
I'm still running my local builds with places history enabled, which works well in the current stage for the most part if one doesn't need a history window or sidebar (which shouldn't be that hard to fix for someone who knows XUL/JS and trees well enough). When I looked into the error console this week, I saw a chrome://browser URI mentioned there and tracked it down to be a bug in toolkit places support, which I created a patch for. Hopefully we can get this in soon, so places in the 1.9 toolkit will be ready for us to switch - independently of us actually doing this or not. (Note once again that this is all about the backend, we don't want the UI for history or even bookmarks to change significantly.) - Release work - SeaMonkey 1.1.8:
I created and uploaded (two sets of) candidate builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.8 this week, which is our upcoming security release for the stable 1.1.x series. We target a release nearly in sync with Firefox 2.0.0.12 this Thursday or Friday. - Extension nightlies:
After a FTP directory for extensions has been created, I set my venkman and ChatZilla tinderbox cycles (reorting to MozillaTest) to upload their builds to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/extensions/ - so we now get nightly builds of those extensions and their language packs in the form that the Makefile process of the Mozilla build systems generates.
Those build may not be 100% the same as generated by the XPI build scripts, but I think we should get them to match as closely as possible. Also, we want the directory to be available through HTTP for better load balancing. - Source L10n:
Spanish (as in "Spain") is the newest SeaMonkey trunk addition, Norwegian now also has ChatZilla and venkman localized on trunk. - German L10n:
We kept up with the pre-FF3b3 checkin rush and I also fixed some consistency and other errors in the SeaMonkey trunk localization. - Various Discussions:
kill-wallet i.e. switching to LoginManager, plans for MailNews future, IPC and OpenPGP, new prefwindow, AMO integration, etc.
I'd like to highlight that web feed detection has landed in SeaMonkey trunk this week, which means that one now gets the already familiar RSS icon with a selection to subscribe feeds when visiting sites that offer them. We still do NOT have any internal feed handling though, bugs for feed preview, livemarks and an integrated feed reader are still open - but the first step in the right direction is done.
Oh, and sorry that I've not been as responsive as usually in the last few days, I found a really cheap set of Age of Empires I & II plus expansion packs in a local store, and I figure I need to get into a bit of nostalgia again, so I've been spending a few hours trying out certain scenarios there, with a few hours of watching a "pretty f***in' awesome" Super Bowl game on Sunday - I'm pretty sure those activities won't hurt SeaMonkey development even if I'm spending a bit of time with them
Von KaiRo, um 22:24 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 1