The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 38/2008 (September 15 - 21, 2008):

• Automated Tests:
  Mnyromyr has created a cool test that checks several windows for duplicated XML element IDs, which even has already caught bugs with our prefwindow migration at checkin, and which has lead to numerous fixes of bugs in several windows before it even was turned on for those. This is great because it should also improve how extensions can hook into our windows and how internal code works because we avoid this class of bugs and really have unique IDs in the checked windows. When he added mailnews windows to this test, he needed to create a dummy mail account as else we would launch the modal account wizard and the windows aren't correctly exposed. We discovered that cleaning up prefs in chrome tests is problematic, so we disabled the cleanup for now.
  Input of chrome test wizards who know a good solution for actually cleaning up here would be very welcome!
• Build Machines:
  I did some work to improve reporting of L10n builders to tinderbox, but it still needs work, unfortunately I don't fully understand the code that does the reporting to the Mozilla-L10n-* tinderbox waterfalls.
  I also made L10n builders not fail uploading when the last locale failed, not do MAR files when L10n repackaging failed, and I tried turning on automatic update snippets for L10n builds, only to realize that this needs more work done.
• Build System & comm-central:
  I landed calendar/ on comm-central so the calendar guys have everything in place to switch development to hg trunk once their 0.9 release is out.
  For hg-based release automation, I made it possible to create release files with "pretty" filenames, which SeaMonkey probably won't use but Firefox does currently and will in the future. As a side-effect, that change made the paths and names of any package we create much more configurable right in the build system.
  As I'm continuously watching the hg changelogs for the Mozilla build system files we've copied as a base for the comm-central build system, I once again created a patch for porting recent changes over to our files and at the same time discovered a first easy part of comm-central build system cleanups.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.x Releases:
  The SeaMonkey 1.1.12 is only waiting for the actual release of the parallel Firefox 2.0.0.17 and 3.0.2 security updates to actually go public, which is currently scheduled for Tuesday, September 23rd, and from what I hear, this date probably will stick this time. I uploaded a number of localized builds to my staging directory to be released right with the original US English version.
• SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 1:
  Lots of triaging and poking people to get the last blockers sorted out and fixed, as well as trying to figure out how to actually create the release builds.
  We are now only waiting on the legacy prefwindow removal to get final reviews and be checked in, and then we're ready to go for tagging and creating builds. Expect those to be up for testing within the next few days.We'll need help smoketesting them on all platforms then before the release can happen.
• German L10n:
  A number of corrections to SeaMonkey trunk L10n could be done thanks to Adrian using de as a testcase for his Silme-based compare-locales work he's doing as a Mozilla intern currently. He discovered a few small glitches in my localization, and I found a few duplicated accesskeys when looking at those places.
• Theme Work:
  As SeaMonkey 2 is nearing its first Alpha release, I wanted to make sure that at least one of my two themes is ready for that, so I spent some time this weekend to update my EarlyBlue theme for the latest changes. It was harder to find out what changes I need to incorporate, as we have no possibility to query for changes in a certain directory in the hg pushlog (I need to look at suite/themes/classic and mozilla/toolkit/themes changes and update my theme for everything affecting it). This was easier with CVS and bonsai, where this was a straight-forward query. I hope we'll get this for hg as well one day, bugs are filed.
  In any case, I have completed my EarlyBlue porting (it's the theme I'm using all the time personally as well) and have put an XPI up on my download page for now, I still need to take the time to get it onto AMO as well.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, leaks, L10n dashboard, Alpha 1 release notes, EU MozCamp, Thunderbird message view, unit test failure, etc.

I know I've been preaching that "we'll have an Alpha soon" for a very long time now. The good thing is that the code actually is practically done now. Some remaining reviews for the removal of the the old preferences window, and we're really done. It's been a long time since we released a testing version to a wider audience, the last was SeaMonkey 1.1 Beta on November 8, 2006, almost two years ago. Back then, we introduced the URL bar color change to yellow on secure sites, tab previews and message tagging as some of the largest changes. Now we're featuring a complete rework of many parts of the app due to the move from 1.8 branch xpfe to 1.9.1 trunk toolkit as well as a number of SeaMonkey-specific and mailnews updates, reworks and features. This ranges from a new Windows installer via a modernized icon set for the default theme, clear private data, undo closed tabs, newsgroup drag-and-drop reordering, add-ons manager and completely redone extension management to <audio> and <video> HTML5 tags, much improved Acid3 compliance and less memory usage, just to name a few examples. It's a really huge step forward, and it shows that we haven't been sitting around doing nothing for the last 2 years.
The SeaMonkey project is not dead, as some people might believe with our last new stable release dating back 20 months - on the contrary, SeaMonkey is more alive than it ever was under that name!