The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 08/2009 (February 16 - 22, 2009):

• Release Management:
  I started the SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 3 release process with tagging and building a first candidate, it looks like we need a second build though.
  Triaging approval requests for things to land and then tagging and building the release builds themselves as well as caring of the version updates needed elsewhere took a lot of my work time this week, actually.
• Conferences:
  As the call for papers for Linuxwochen in Vienna ended this week, I spent some time on summarizing what I'm planning to talk about there ("The Open Internet And Mozilla").
  Additionally, I spent some time preparing for the Lift09 conference I'm attending as one of Mozilla's representatives there.
  Oh, and I've been asked if I want to attend the MAOW in Berlin in March and maybe give a talk there. If so, would something like "Porting Add-Ons to SeaMonkey 2" sound interesting?
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I processed experimental language packs for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3, looks like we can ship 13 of those this time.
• German L10n:
  German SeaMonkey was kept up with trunk, so that Alpha 3 can also have a well-working experimental langpack.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, (un)forking of mailnews files, HTML5, etc.

This status update is not as long as usual, both due to the a3 release having taken up quite some time and due to me having an early flight to Geneva for being on Lift09 most of this week, and I actually need to get up in less than 4 hours, which is all of possible sleep I can get this night. I hope I'll come back from this conference with lots of ideas and inspiration on the future and Mozilla's as well as SeaMonkey's roles in it!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 07/2009 (February 09 - 15, 2009):

• Build System:
  Due to some recent changes, we had broken extension langpack packaging in two ways, I fixed one of those cases and also checked in the other one.
• Release Management:
  As SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 3 is nearing and we are in a freeze for that pre-release now, I looked into a number of requests for approval of patches to still land for this milestone, granting all of them so far, as they were good fixups and things we want to get tested on this alpha. We're now down to a state where I don't think there's much, if anything, left to still land at this stage. I also looked at our buildbot configurations somewhat but I'm not sure yet if I feel confident enough that I can get buildbot release automation to fully run this week, so I might once again go with the set of scripts I used for Alpha 2, esp. as we still can't ship L10n builds this time (see below).
• Misc Development:
  As the old fishcam is dead, I switched our Crtl+Alt+F easter egg to the new fishcam site operated by Lou Montulli, the inventor of Netscape's original "Amazing Fish Cam". Thanks Lou!
  I also investigated a session restore leak that we found to be fixed by a cleanup patch I later landed for Misak.
• German L10n:
  Once again I brought German SeaMonkey up to sync with trunk, and I also fixed an accesskey problem in the add-ons window.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, (un)forking of mailnews files, KompoZer and Composer, FOSDEM aftermath, toolbar/menubar customization, 3rd-party requirement for commit access, etc.

As we're wrapping up SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 3, it's time to take a look at what larger things made it into that release that should be tested - and which still didn't.
Early in this alpha cycle we could land places history, including storage of way more history entries with good performance and the new smart location bar autocomplete algorithm, which is said to be "awesome" for a number of people. We also could switch to the new login manager instead of the old "wallet" for password management, which shouldn't be much visible for user other than that we have reduced the number of modal dialogs and being able to remember password-only logins. A feature that probably will be appreciated by many users is toolbar customization, which now fully works for the browser component, extending it to at least mailnews, maybe more, is planned for the near future. The last large feature to go into Alpha 3 was session restore, enabling users to get back your windows and tabs after crashes and restarts of SeaMonkey.
The new download manager unfortunately couldn't make it yet, some work to switch the backend is still missing. Unfortunately, that also means that localized builds are still broken, but we'll ship experimental language packs once again for Alpha 3. Feed preview and tabbed mail both still need more work and are also still missing from this milestone, same for Mac theme improvements and full adaptation of Modern to SeaMonkey 2 - for the latter, we're still looking for someone who understands both our review process and theme CSS work to drive the existing work for it into the tree. We'd also appreciate if someone could help with OpenSearch support or else that one will not make SeaMonkey 2.

All in all, there are enough large changes along with the usual list of smaller changes and fixes that SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3 should be interesting to test, but the list of things to work on is still significant. There's still some work to do on larger features, and of course a good number of cleanup tasks for the beta and final phase of this major release cycle, but it looks more and more manageable and I trust we're on the right way to an exciting SeaMonkey 2 release.

The future begins in summer 2009!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 06/2009 (February 02 - 08, 2009):

• Build System:
  My patch for faster builds got approval and is now in 1.9.1 as well, I hope depend builds are really faster again now.
• Website Work:
  I did some work to finally get the download pages on www.mozilla.org redirect to the project list. This has been a long-going story and it's nice to see it finally resolved.
• FOSDEM:
  Most of the time time week was occupied with work for FOSDEM, be it creating the slides for my talk, or the traveling to Brussels and actually attending the conference there - including its usual overloaded network.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Argentinian Spanish could be added as the 23rd language to SeaMonkey trunk.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, session (re)store, feed preview, release schedules, FOSDEM, SeaMonkey vision, toolbar customization, Vista theming, etc.

The FOSDEM weekend went well despite the cold I caught right before traveling there, my talk wasn't too well-attended but probably that had to do with the fact that it was at 9am after a Mozilla dinner the night before. There weren't many reactions to the new SeaMonkey vision, which I count as a sign that it's basically what most people expect of us. I got to know a number of new people, met again with a number of folks I've met a few times already, had some fun and some very interesting talks about Mozilla, SeaMonkey and a few other things. I hope the results of those talks will be visible in some way, and I'm looking forward to the next FOSDEM!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 05/2009 (January 26 - February 01, 2009):

• Build System:
  I did another buildsystem port as well as a followup fix to it, and I also updated the L10n Makefiles. We should be better in sync with the Mozilla 1.9.1 build system now.
  The patch for easier default profile L10n also saw a slight update but is waiting for review now.
  The work Callek did earlier for GLOBAL_DEPS (and which I ported to comm-central) made the build system rebuild "the world" (i.e. the whole build) when autoconf-mk changes, which is basically a good thing as we now catch all variable changes there without needing to clobber. The problem is though that every run of configure regenerates autoconf.mk and so causes such a rebuild right now. I found a solution to this now so we will only cause rebuilds when autoconf.mk did actually change. The comm-central part has landed, but the Mozilla part still needs review and 1.9.1 approval.
• Download Manager UI:
  A last patch for the new download manager UI before having the backend is ready now. I hope we can close the gap and get the backend ready soon so we can switch to this for Alpha 3.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Added Romanian to SeaMonkey as well as support for Japanese ChatZilla/Venkman.
• German L10n:
  Did some updates to match current trunk development, orthographical fixes and some accesskey corrections.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, session (re)store, feed preview, release schedules, FOSDEM, SeaMonkey vision, Lightning, toolbar customization, etc.

I'm preparing a build with tabmail, feed preview, and session restore, possibly even the new download manager, for doing a demo this upcoming weekend at FOSDEM, I hope people will be awake on Sunday morning to see both that and the new SeaMonkey vision I will be presenting.
I'm looking forward to meeting many Mozillians as well as people from other projects in Brussels!