The roads I take...

As I'm back to work, my weekly status reports are back as well (though this one's a bit delayed due to me jumping into some cool work this week).
Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 17/2008 (April 21 - 27, 2008), plus some notes about the weeks before:

• US Visit And Its Impacts:
  I had a number of interesting conversations about Mozilla and SeaMonkey over in California and got to know a lot of people. I got no details to report here, but some things I discussed there might help us in the longer term.
  
  Most of the work I did last week, following the two weeks in the US, was working the backlog of things I couldn't tend to in that time (and I still haven't started to read planet again).
• The Next SeaMonkey 1.1.x Release:
  We had a number of discussions on IRC and newsgroups about Firefox 2.0.0.14 and its impact on SeaMonkey, i.e. if we should do another release with just that one fix that shipped in the Firefox update.
  SeaMonkey releases are much more painful than Firefox releases, as we have no automated release process yet, no automated creation of localized builds, and no automated and/or partial update functionality - which all results in much higher efforts for developers, localizers and users to do another stability/security release.
  As this crash doesn't seem to happen that often for SeaMonkey users and there's no proof that it could even be an exploitable security risk, we decided to better wait a few weeks and release a 1.1.10 with some more fixes in parallel with Firefox 2.0.0.15 (the usual interval to the next such release is 6 weeks).
  People who really need a version with this fix can use 1.1.10pre nightlies for now, which should have no additional problem, but might have additional fixes. The big difference of those to a release is that they get less testing and have no release notes.
  In parallel, we're working on getting SeaMonkey 2 ready for an alpha, which we hope to have within weeks now.
• German L10n:
  Some small platform string updates were necessary, I also updated SeaMonkey L10n to be complete again on trunk.
• Various Discussions:
  Thunderbird alpha, address book plans, California traveling followup work, etc.

Slightly more than a month ago, I requested people to help with triaging old unconfirmed suite bugs so that we know what issues we really need to look into and which are misfiled or meanwhile resolved. A few people, like Tony Mechelynck for example, have since dug through the list that had been at more than 1000 bugs and reduced it to currently just under 200 and still decreasing! Just look at the open bug graph for the suite product and you'll notice the large impact of their work!
Many thanks to everyone helping with this - I hope we can get even more old cruft out of the system so the real bugs get more visible and easier to deal with!

Back in February, at FOSDEM, I was interviewed by Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe, about the SeaMonkey project and my contributions to Mozilla. While I was in the US, Tristan has now published this video interview on his blog, so if you want to know how I came to work with Mozilla and SeaMonkey and what's going on in the project, just watch this video!

(Oh, and yes, I'm back from California, it was a great trip, with some talk about SeaMonkey and a good amount of vacation in between, I'm currently trying to work the backlog of those two weeks and get up to speed with what's going on. You'll hear more from me soon right here.)

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 14/2008 (March 30 - April 6, 2008):

• SeaMonkey 1.1.9 Release:
  I added a number of additional contributed builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.9 this week.
• Preference Panels Work:
  My patch for website icons for bookmarks could be checked in now.
  I'm still waiting on a decision about keeping or dropping the OJI JVM selection code on the advanced pref panel.
• Account manager accesskeys:
  Giacomo Magnini ("prometeo") did a bunch of fixes to accesskeys in account manager panels which I reviewed - thanks a lot for those, Giacomo!
• German L10n:
  I filed a few bugs regarding untranslated platform strings that were brought to light by Axel's "unchanged strings" tool.
  Additionally, we kept up with pre-FF3RC1 late-l10n and suite L10n changes.
• Various Discussions:
  California traveling, GTK "dropmarker" arrows, bug triage, etc.

I'm filing this report today as I'll be on the plane tomorrow and probably not work much either on Sunday. Not sure if I'll file reports for the next two weeks separately, most of my Mozilla/SeaMonkey work in those weeks will probably consist in talks and meetings in California.

Have a good two weeks, you'll hear from me again afterward (and I hope to meet a few of you in person)!

Talking about my traveling to California for the next two weeks, Seth Bindernagel asked me if I wanted to give a Brown Bag presentation in MV, and this sounded like a great idea to me.

So, next Monday, April 7th, at 11:30 PDT, everyone at Mozilla HQ, Mountain View, is invited to attend my Brown Bag on the topic of Community Project Organization & SeaMonkey 2 (I'm actually recycling my FOSDEM talk from February this year - I don't think we have much audience overlap with that).

I hope we'll have a nice crowd of people there and I can meet and talk to a bunch of folks there that I only know from IRC and newsgroups so far!

See you on Monday!