The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 18/2008 (April 28 - May 4, 2008):

• Automated Testing:
  As noted earlier on this blog, I worked quite a lot on getting automated testing running for SeaMonkey, as I finally got access to the VMs that were created for this (thanks to Mozilla IT and build people!).
  I also made broswer-chrome test pass once the machines themselves were up and running and patched them so they test-run Andrew's patch for mochitest focus problems, which made all tests pass on Linux (Windows has a few remaining problems, possibly due to a small window size).
• Preference Migration:
  I checked in the migration of ChatZilla integration to the SeaMonkey prefwindow so that those options are available in the new window now as well.
  Additionally, I worked on a new iteration of the advanced panel patch, eliminating the old JVM switch cruft.
  Finally on this topic, I also did a new patch for application preferences help, addressing the open review comments.
• L10n-friendlier "Close" accesskey:
  When investigating a duplicate accesskeys in German, I found out that "Close" and "Close Tab" in the SeaMonkey browser window were reusing the same accesskey defined for "Close" elsewhere, which is a nightmare for localizers finding out what accesskeys to use where. I filed a bug for that and finally fixed it.
• nsSuiteGlue Cleanup:
  As in the case of fixing sanitizer tests I added myself for automated testing, I worked on a second fix this week to a bug I introduced myself:
  When someone else asked my about nsSuiteGlue observers and I looked at the code again, it struck me that we never actually did a call to remove observers and I created a patch for fixing this by porting a few lines I accidentally deleted when porting this from Firefox.
  (As a side note, this was because that "someone", being Misak Khachatryan, is now working on session restore for SeaMonkey!)
• kill-xpfe:
  When Camino people obsoleted a few more xpfe components in their bug to move away from xpfe, I did cvs removals of those parts of code. Another part of xpfe is history.
  (Some people may notice an inflation of "kill-*" names in my project language, I've adopted the style invented in mailnews with "kill-mork" and "kill-rdf" and started using it for "kill-wallet", "kill-winhooks" and now even "kill-xpfe" )
• German L10n:
  I kept SeaMonkey L10n complete on trunk, even though it remains orange for some excess strings (the reporter ones may get killed in a mass-removal for all localizations, the mailnews one might come back soon as that patch got removed temporarily for the Thunderbird alpha).
• Various Discussions:
  Download manager, password manager, AMO and SeaMonkey themes, session (re)store, places backends, Thunderbird/mailnews development, addressbook improvements, etc.

There has been some talk about what policy to follow for SeaMonkey patches with respect to automated testing, now that we have the frameworks running on dedicated machines. Though it's not a firm decision yet, it seems like the best way is for reviewers to require tests for r+ where they are feasible (reviewers should be able to decide that). I'd like to encourage everyone to write tests where it's possible to test their work automatically right from the beginning, and only only per request of reviewers, though. And I'd like to urge reviewers ti require tests from patch writers where they are possible. We have the infrastructure now, let's really use it!