The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 52/2008 (December 22 - 28, 2008):

• Releases:
  I continued uploading contributed SeaMonkey 1.1.14 builds as they came in.
• Automated Tests:
  Right before the holidays, I tried to make all SeaMonkey tinderbox columns green and fixed a SeaMonkey test failure by moving a test into Firefox-specific code as well marking the correct test parts "todo" in another test. That worked fine, but just as I checked in those, Marco from the places team checked in a patch that caused a different test to fail on SeaMonkey as we don't implement the "private browsing" feature on the product side (yet).
• Password Manager:
  Mark posted a new WIP patch for the switch of mailnews to the toolkit login manager, replacing the old, unmaintained xpfe wallet code that both Thunderbird and SeaMonkey still use for password management.
  Following up on that, I worked on dusting off and unbitrotting the SeaMonkey switchover patches we had waiting for some time. Things seems to be working fine locally, so expect the patches to appear on the bug soon.
• German L10n:
  Landed some updates for the German ChatZilla L10n in both hg repositories.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, tabmail and tabbrowser, etc.

I spent most of this week without a computer or Internet at all, during the holidays I didn't turn the laptop on in 4 complete days, with "only" 1.5 hours of checking email on a 5th day, so naturally I didn't get much stuff done for SeaMonkey. On the other hand, I could "recharge my batteries" having some fun time with my parents, brother and friends, so I should have even more energy for doing work now - I hope you all had a chance to regain energy this way as well.
And, adding to all the joy: Congratulations to our SeaMonkey team member Justin and his fiancée on having their first child!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 51/2008 (December 15 - 21, 2008):

• Misc Development:
  The removal of the "what's related" sidebar has been completed (it was probably mostly unused, had privacy implications, and unmaintained binary code). Everyone missing it should watch out for the Alexa sidebar add-on.
• Releases:
  We released SeaMonkey 1.1.14 on Tuesday. As we did the first build run a bit later than Firefox, we already did include the fix the Mozilla Corporation people "forgot" in some shipped 2.0.0.19 builds and so couldn't come in the problem of potentially shipping the wrong builds. 1.1.14 includes all fixes that are in Firefox 2.0.0.20, and there will be future 1.1.x security update releases, even though Firefox will not ship 2.x updates at the same time any more.
• Automated Tests:
  We had some test failures occurring on SeaMonkey lately, and a long-standing leak issue I had been thinking about off and on.
  As I "caused" one of the failures by enabling that test in SeaMonkey with the places patch, I tried to figure out was was going on with it and created a patch that moves it into Firefox-specific code as it uses features only supported there.
  Another test had been failing since it was introduced and what it tests doesn't even work on my local Firefox builds but somehow succeeds in their tinderboxes, not on SeaMonkey's though - it looks like opening documents in new windows isn't as clean as it should be. I created a fix that could go in and marked the test todo for SeaMonkey, but "unfortunately" it half-succeeds on Windows, so this isn't completely done yet.
  The long-standing EM RDF leak had been mitigated somewhat by a recent EM fix, and after Dave Townsend ("Mossop") reminded me that there was a JS workaround in the bug, I decided to clean that one up and worked it into a patch that removes the EM datasources on window unload, and the helped our leak reports quite a bit.
• Download Manager:
  We've been planning for some time to move to the toolkit download manager backend, but always wanted to keep a tree-based download window similar to what SeaMonkey 1.x has (which was one of the motivations for toolkit getting a nice way to plug custom UI onto their backend). I invested some time into trying how we can do that this week. I hope to have more progress soon, what I have currently is basically a very rough sample, more a proof of concept than a usable download manager.
• SeaMonkey Vision:
  As our current project goals wiki document becomes (out)dated and the main goal of "keep a suite which is similar from a user's perspective to Mozilla 1.7.x" is something we have achieved in the SeaMonkey 1.x release series and keeping the project alive, and even the "plan to move to toolkit/ for the sake of code maintenance" becomes reality with SeaMonkey 2, I had started a thread on longer-term SeaMonkey goals a while ago, with the prospect of forming a real vision for the project from the comments of the community.
  This week, I summarized the comments and later grouped what they were saying by topics. This will form the base of our future vision, for which I'll make a proposal to the SeaMonkey Council soon.
• German L10n:
  Mostly ongoing work to keep up with comm-central and 1.9.1 development.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, places prefs, Get All Messages, tabmail, fishcam, etc.

We're nearing the probably only few days in the year where many of us find some silence and time for some non-work activities with their family and friends. I wish everyone who is celebrating this week a very Merry Christmas and hope they'll have relaxing and peaceful holidays.
To everyone not celebrating this holiday (right now), I want to apologize for not responding as fast as usual this upcoming week - I need this time out myself to gather strength for the upcoming year, where we're planning on doing great things for SeaMonkey!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 50/2008 (December 8 - 14, 2008):

• Build System:
  My fixup to in-package directory names with "pretty" package names also made 1.9.1 now.
• Misc Development:
  I started to work on removing the "what's related" sidebar, which is probably mostly unused, has privacy implications, and unmaintained binary code. For everyone who still wants it, the version that one saw there is still available as the Alexa sidebar add-on.
• Releases:
  SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 was released this week, I also did some more work for preparing 1.1.14, still targeted for December 16th.
• Places History:
  I landed some small cleanups for the places code I checked in the week before, and UI-reviewed the comeback of grouping in the history window Neil coded up along with further cleanup of code we imported from Firefox but didn't need in this form in our history-only view of places.
  Additionally, mork history is finally gone from the Mozilla trees now.
  Following our places landing, a few places tests were broken in SeaMonkey, I could find fixes for all but one test in that location, which has its own problems being located in places, but testing a toolkit feeds fix by using Firefox-specific feed code.
• L10n:
  We released 11 experimental langpacks for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2, thanks to the work of the L10n community. I still hope for being able to have fully localized builds some time soon.
• German L10n:
  I once again tried to keep up with current development to keep German L10n green.
• Various Discussions:
  Toolbar customization, places prefs, Get All Messages, test failures, l10n.ini and 1.9.1, 2.0a2 feedback, planet, etc.

Things are really moving now in SeaMonkey 2.0 land, and the new version of the integrated Internet suite starts to take shape. If everything goes the way it looks to go right now, Alpha 3 should deliver a very good amount of interesting features and most of what we want to achieve for this version. Things like allowing resuming of downloads across sessions, smoother password managing, session restore, toolbar customization, or tabbed mail are all trying to join the reworked history and urlbar autocomplete as new features in the next alpha. I hope all of those and perhaps even more things can really make it there, so we can show off where the suite is going in the near future.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 49/2008 (December 1 - 7, 2008):

• Build System:
  I landed yet another build system sync patch and did a followup to the client.py branch switch so that it runs with python 2.6, which prohibits using a [default] section in any INI-format config file.
  My fixup to in-package directory names with "pretty" package names was landed in mozilla-central, but not 1.9.1 yet.
• Misc Development:
  The mailWidgets fork is completed now.
  The superfluous inclusion of global/skin is now gone from mozilla-central, I hope it will be approved for 1.9.1 soon as it makes grippies not appear on the new history window.
• Releases:
  I worked on both SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 and 1.1.14 this week, tagging and creating candidate builds for both. While the former is expected to be released in the next few days, the latter is targeted for December 16th.
  I also filed and partially fixed a few bugs related to those releases, for bumping version numbers, bug flags and keywords, bouncer additions, etc.
  For the alpha, I needed to figure out how to use the automatic update system (AUS) for releases the first time, and decided we will only ship complete updates this time, as setting up partial update generation is too much work manually - we'll have that with the automated release harness in future releases. The complete updates from 2.0 Alpha 1 to Alpha 2 are prepared and tested for all 3 major platforms though.
• Places History:
  As already posted here, I worked on the last iterations of my patch for switching SeaMonkey history to places, addressing a number of further review comments, and removing more non-history parts of the UI files I ported from Firefox (we're keeping separate UI for history and bookmarks, even if we might switch to using places for the bookmarks backend one time - which hasn't happened yet). Finally, I landed that patch on Sunday and enabled that new backend for everyone, including the new "awesome" location bar autocomplete algorithm and increased amounts of stored history.
  During development and after checkin, I filed a couple of followup bugs on cleanups, bugs, problems and further work. Oh, and I did a patch for removing the xpfe mork history, finally.
• L10n:
  I followed up on SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 and L10n, now 11 language packs are repackaged, roughly tested (i.e. they bring up localized and usable browser, navigator, add-ons and preferences windows) and will appear as experimental language packs for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2. Thanks to our localization community for providing the work to make this possible!
• German L10n:
  The de locale was kept up-to-date both for the Alpha 2 release as well as the following changes in strings, including the places landing.
• Various Discussions:
  1.9.1 branch switching, UI changes from 1.x to 2.0, refreshing debug/QA menus, toolbar customization, mailnews de-rdf, APNG throbber, Get All Messages, incubator repositories module, de L10n of Mozilla brochure and manifesto, etc.

It's great to see SeaMonkey finally using places as the history backend, meaning less of that strange, Mozilla-only "mork" database format and more of the widely used SQLite database format in the backend, usage of less barely maintained xpfe code and more well-maintained, shared toolkit code, and some great new features for the location bar's autocomplete search as well as the ability to store more history data with less memory usage and no decrease in performance. This code change needs some time of testing in the development builds and nightlies and probably some followup fixes and improvements before it can get make its way even into Alpha 3, but it's a good step forward towards SeaMonkey 2.
Before that, we're about to release Alpha 2 this upcoming week, which doesn't contain that code yet, but debuts finer-grained control over toolbar icons and text (only in the browser and the main mail windows, for now) as well as a feed reader in the mail component and numerous other changes, like the toolkit-based find as you type and a large list of Mozilla core improvements we share with the other Mozilla-based products, including Firefox 3.1 as the front-runner in the family.
This is really a good time for being a part of the SeaMonkey project.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 48/2008 (November 24 - 30, 2008):

• Build System:
  The L10n Makefile restructuring for all three comm-central apps landed, as well as a fix for the zip and MAR breakage caused by that restructuring, which was partly my oversight (zip part) and partly ported (MAR/update stuff). The latter also needed a L10n buildbot change, but the whole generation of localized update files is nicer code now.
  When the Mozilla build team reported that the directory name of Firefox 3.1b2 builds wrongly was uppercased inside the zip and .tar.bz2 packages, I created another patch for this in the prettyname bug.
• Misc Development:
  After another Thunderbird header view change caused the SeaMonkey mail window to break heavily, I discussed the matter with SeaMonkey and Thunderbird developers and came up with a patch to fork the XBL for the header view widgets, reverting the SeaMonkey part to pre-TB-patch state and fixing our side. Later I came up with the Thunderbird side of the fork, but that one is still awaiting review.
  I also fixed up the icons in the Mac Modern task menu which looked garbled due to not supporting -moz-image-region.
• Release Management:
  We froze comm-central for Thunderbird 3.0b1 and SeaMonkey 2.0a2 on Tuesday, and subsequently I handled a number of approvals and tried to get things moving on the last blockers. We should be fairly close to relbranching and tagging now and hopefully should have candidate builds for Alpha 2 soon.
• Websites:
  Finally, the long-going chapter of obsolete L10n docs on www.mozilla.org could be closed by just removing the complete directory of old MLP pages from there. There is an archive page for getting the historical content, and current docs are on MDC and the Mozilla wiki.
  The 1.1.13 relnotes got a bit of an overhaul, removing the link to old Mozilla 1.x end user docs and including the content from there in the SeaMonkey site.
  Answering a request in a bug report, I also created screenshot pages for SeaMonkey 1.1 and SeaMonkey 2, those still need better linking though.
• L10n:
  I posted in the L10n group/list about SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 and L10n, announcing that we'll have experimental language packs once again, but no localized builds.
• Various Discussions:
  Details of 1.9.1 branching, UI changes from 1.x to 2.0, EV UI, new cert error page, toolbar customization, mailnews de-rdf, help viewer, etc.

Alpha 2 should be pretty much wrapped up, and I think it will be another good milestone to show people and to get some testing on. Watch the newsgroups for a request to test the candidate builds!