The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2009 (January 19 - 25, 2009):

• Build System:
  GLOBAL_DEPS are now working on comm-central, which also means that we rebuild code on changes to autoconf.mk and config.mk - we're too eager to rebuild right now on both Mozilla and comm-central, but we have an idea how to solve that.
  Once again, I did a number of build system ports to comm-central, split into a general and L10n Makefile part. Those are only ports for stuff in 1.9.1, I'll take a look at additional things in mozilla-central once we branch comm-central.
  Based on this, I also tried to work on easier default profile localization, there are a few obstacles in that though and the patch needs more work.
• Download Manager UI:
  Another new patch for the new download manager UI is here, it should be pretty final for this iteration, we now need to wait on the backend to see something actually work. Meanwhile, some followup bugs were filed on improvements to make once the initial UI has landed.
• Automated tests:
  Due to a new leak that had been uncovered by our XUL ID test, I tried porting this test to Firefox - even though our leak turned out to be SeaMonkey-specific, this test could help Firefox to not regress it main window, and even to improve their preferences window, as it's shown up as leaking in that test (and it has some string bundle IDs duplicated).
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Galician and Japanese have been added to the supported SeaMonkey languages, now we're trying to build 21 languages for SeaMonkey trunk daily and hope to ship all those and more for 2.0 final.
• German L10n:
  SeaMonkey strings was kept up-to-date with comm-central trunk most of the time.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, SeaMonkey vision, Lightning, toolbar customization, langpacks and release automation, bmo reorg part 2, newsgroup spam, etc.

While I'm still trying to get used to all the new eye-candy I'm working with now, I see more and more important pieces of SeaMonkey 2 come together - now even Windows/Linux browser toolbar customization has landed on trunk! Some things like history / location bar improvements and the better password management backend also have already landed for Alpha 3, others like session restore, feed preview, download manager improvements, OS X browser toolbar customization and tabbed mail are being worked on and we also hope to be able to ship those in that last alpha. There will be regressions and rough edges, that's why it's still an alpha, but we're trying to push all those features into that one so that we get them tested and have some room for finishing them up and smoothing the experience for beta before putting on the finishing touches to go for a final release later on. The plans for this seem to hold up well for now.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2009 (January 12 - 18, 2009):

• Misc Development Work:
  I checked in the patch for an --enable-static --enable-tests compile failure and an automated test problem to the mozilla-central and 1.9.1 codebases.
  The improved throbber animation could also be checked in (to comm-central, of course) - it took me several hours though to blog about the process of creating those APNGs.
  We have been investigating an add-ons problem for some time this week, with some help of my memories and the original reporter, Mark finally found the problem and a fix.
• Password Manager:
  Finally, both SeaMonkey and Thunderbird switched away from old, unmaintained xpfe wallet code and adopted the toolkit LoginManager code instead, which we now share with Firefox, see Standard8's blog post for more details about the switch. The SeaMonkey-specific patches landed together with that work as well, that work by Neil, Serge and me should make people feel no real difference in terms of UI, except the switch away from modal dialogs and to browser notification bars for the "remember" prompts and autocomplete on the user fields in web forms instead of the modal dialog for filling in passwords when multiple logins are stored.
  I know a few very loud-voiced people like the modal dialogs better than the alternatives, but much more people like avoiding the modal dialogs better. The new UI, esp. for discovery/autofill of multiple saved passwords/accounts could be better (see the relevant bug), we know that. The fact is that keeping old code around without maintenance is worse in terms of stability and security than adopting maintained code with known flaws, but at least have someone work on the code. Patches for improving that code are not just welcome, but will likely even be reviewed by someone - something we couldn't guarantee for the old code.
• Places History:
  A change in the toolkit code for the matchOnlyTyped preference caused test failures and non-working UI, which I created a patch for. It got reviews, but I needed to wait until after the weekend for checkin.
  By the way, we realized that the autocomplete.enable pref doesn't work right now, but the toolkit code will be changed in a way that it will work again, along with the existing SeaMonkey UI, and Firefox UI will be changed to use it as well.
• Download Manager UI:
  Some more addressing of review comments for the new download manager UI, but more to be done here.
• German L10n:
  German SeaMonkey strings was updated for trunk checkins, including the above mentioned password manager code.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, test leaks, SeaMonkey vision, Lightning, toolbar customization, etc.

In this week's status meeting, we have decided to give SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3 another week of development compared to the previous schedule, so that we can keep our code freeze in sync with Thunderbird. We will now take code changes for this last alpha until February 5 and hope to make builds, test them and get them out to the public soon afterwards. This won't change the schedule we have in mind for final as we only have rough dates even internally so far - and there's not much secrecy about what we have in mind: After this alpha, we're planning on only one beta before the final release so far, with about one and a half months of development/testing time between milestones, it's an easy guess where rough planning takes us. I stated previously that we target the second quarter of 2009 for the final release, I hope we really won't slip those rough schedules as far as to not make that - as you can calculate, we have some flexibility for this to still stay withing the range of that quarter.
This summer, we should have a stable toolkit-based SeaMonkey release for everyone out there!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 02/2009 (January 5 - 11, 2009):

• Places History:
  Making tests even more robust against different default prefs as well as adding UI prefs for places have landed now, so we now have graphical preferences that determine if we match website titles as well or just URLs, where in the title/URL we find matches - and even the minimum of days to save history for.
• Misc Development Work:
  When I investigated how well the Lightning calendar extension will work with SeaMonkey once tabbed mail lands, I saw the error console filled with messages related to a status bar progress difference we had compared to Thunderbird, Firefox and Sunbird - for which I whipped up a patch, got it reviewed and checked in. With this, showing the status bar progress indicator works the same way in all our 1.9.1-based applications now - and Lighting doesn't come up with any error any more when the tabbed mail patch is used with SeaMonkey (there are still missing items in the UI due to unsuccessful overlays, but they don't result in errors).
  I also filed a bug and patch on a recently introduced automated test problem with SeaMonkey - it doesn't make much sense to port failure workaround hacks for specific failures to tests about something different.
  While I was looking into tests, I created a patch for the --enable-static --enable-tests compile failure that has been seen in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey for some time - even though I saw we have certain problems with actually executing tests in that configuration in any case.
  In addition to that, I spent a number of hours on the weekend on improving the throbber animation, which involved extracting an swf movie from a larger swf with the original throbber work from our logo designer, then extracting SVGs for all its frames from that swf, batch-editing those SVGs, then writing up a GIMP batch script for converting the SVG frames to alpha-transparent PNGs, and finally assembling those into APNG images. Not to mention the mass of documentation I read to get this done and the search for tools and testing them to finally find some that could do what I wanted. I'll probably do another blog post on that work soon.
• Organizational Tasks:
  When our website failed, I filed a bug and contacted Mozilla server admins, who recogized what had happened and fixed the problem.
  Something very similar needed to be done for a nightly symbol upload failure.
  As hgweb has been configured meanwhile to not need ugly "index.cgi/" chunks in the URLs, I could remove those from a number of places in our buildbot configs.
  Finally, I also found the time to write up a proposal for the future vision of the SeaMonkey project based on the comments on the threads I started in newsgroups about that. I mailed this proposal to the SeaMonkey Council and some additional core developers, and we hope to have at least a signed-off official draft very soon. Watch this blog and the SeaMonkey newsgroups for more news about that.
• Download Manager UI:
  I continued work on the new download manager UI, mainly by addressing the first batches of review comments and fixing a few bugs. We also figured out a few things to work on in followup bugs once this UI rewrite has landed - and all that before anyone has even tested that work in SeaMonkey itself.
• German L10n:
  Once again, German SeaMonkey strings were kept current, additionally, a de help update was landed.
• Various Discussions:
  Login manager, tabmail, feed preview, FOSDEM, etc.

FOSDEM is coming around in a few weeks once again, once again with a Mozilla presence (this time including a main-track opening keynote by Mozilla's Mark Surman!) and I also will be attending yet again. I hope I'll meet a good number of Mozilla and even SeaMonkey folks there, as well as people from other projects (I'm esp. interested in maemo, openSUSE and KDE - depending on what/who is present there). My plans include a talk about "SeaMonkey 2 and the vision beyond", which will show off a bit of a demo of where SeaMonkey 2 is headed (probably with a heavily patched build unless all the great stuff actually lands before then) and present the (draft of the) new long-term vision of the SeaMonkey project. Hopefully this will be able to give the crowd there some new insights, as this is what I also want to take with me from this event when it comes to other projects.

I'm looking forward to this classic experience once again - if you have the time it's really worth traveling there for a weekend with a mindbogglingly big number of geeks in one single place (and also interesting insights into what's going on in the free and open source software world)!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 01/2009 (December 29, 2008 - January 4, 2009):

• Places History:
  As we'll be using a different, new pref for telling places to only look at history for urlbar autocomplete, we also need to make test even more robust against different default prefs, which I created a patch for.
  Additionally, I also created a patch for adding UI prefs for places, including the change to that other default pref.
• Password Manager:
  I got new reviews on the patches for switching SeaMonkey to LoginManager, and Mark is nearing fully reviewed state for the (mailnews) backend switch, so expect SeaMonkey (and Thunderbird) to be throwing away wallet and also turn password management over to toolkit really soon now.
• Download Manager UI:
  As already mentioned in this blog, I did a lot of work on creating a tree-based manager window for the toolkit download manager so that SeaMonkey can have a download manager that is similar to its current one, but evolved into an even improved version, once the backend switchover has been done.
  Before the holidays, I had a rough proof-of-concept done, this week I involved it into an actually working download manager window with a good set of functionality, and in the end even produced a first patch on the newly filed bug for the new UI. Some small pieces may not yet be perfect when the first version lands, but it will already feature a number of improvements over the old one as well as having a familiar look and feel.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Venkman gained Polish L10n this week, and localized ChatZilla is now also available in Brazilian Portuguese SeaMonkey builds.
• German L10n:
  Updates a number of German SeaMonkey strings in both hg repositories, and also cleaned up superfluous newlines caused by a bug in my beautify_mt_output script used for transforming MozillaTranslator output into localized files that match en-US as closely as possible.
• Various Discussions:
  Temporary failures in automated tests, tabmail, feed preview, CA activities and policy modules, comm-central Bugzilla components, etc.

Sorry for being quite late with this update, going home and mostly offline for my dad's birthday early this week made me push out writing this up.

This year is still very young, but the list of things going on in SeaMonkey code is impressive: tabbed mail, a new password manager backend, a reworked and improved download manager, session restore, feed preview, and customizable toolbars for the browser all have patches up for review currently and we hope to get the majority of those into Alpha 3, the reworked history and urlbar autocomplete backend has already landed in time for that next milestone. It really seems like SeaMonkey 2 is finally taking shape - count on a final release this year (our target for it is in Q2/2009 currently)!

A Happy New Year from and with the SeaMonkey project!