The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 30/2009 (July 20 - 26, 2009):

• Release Process:
  I spent quite some time the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release this week again, the good news is that it was about setting the finishing touches and making the release public on Tuesday (missing the moon landing anniversary by just a day). Builds for Windows, Linux and Mac in 17 languages as well as partial and complete updates (for US English, we didn't have any localized versions before) could be delivered right from the first minute and what I wrote up in the announcement seems to be reflected in some media coverage we get.
• Build System and Release Harness:
  The version bump problem I found in Beta 1 work got reviews and could land once I had time after the release was public. With that and the beta release coming off it, I could mark the release harness as fixed.
  Build with mozilla-central now requite wireless-tools on Linux, I fixed the x86_64 box by installing those. Also mainly for the mozilla-central trees, I installed Java 6 on the Windows machines, this also fixed a leak that only had happened on a single machine but introduced a known leak that is fixed on mozilla-central but not 1.9.1 yet.
  As a side note, I should have the SeaMonkey 1.1 build machines up and running again, I'm still investigating an issue with the Linux box and its X server.
• SeaMonkey Project Website:
  Landed the the reworked 2.0 Beta 1 download page with the locale matrix and the download button figuring out the fitting language as well as OS.
• Statistics on Dev Site:
  From time to time, I like to play with my SeaMonkey development website and get resources up there that I think are helpful for our project. Last weekend, I created more elaborate weekly bug and release radar statistics to get a better view of current work in historic perspective and to get a better overview for release planning.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  14 locales plus US English shipped as official builds in 2.0 Beta 1, two shipped as experimental/unofficial with a note that they didn't fully meet quality and formal requirements for official builds at this time, but I think both should be up to making it for Beta 2. Overall, this beta was a good experience in terms of L10n, and I hope we'll get more locales joining in for the second beta and the final release.
• German L10n:
  Synched up with geolocation and mailnews string changes, discussed de community IRC meetings with Topal.
• Various Discussions:
  Add-on blocklist, landing dlmgr search fix, tabmail, mozilla-central build problems, Gecko/platform 1.9.2 planning and SeaMonkey/Thunderbird, security updates for vulnerabilities disclosed at BlackHat, etc.

The SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release seems to go well so far. We have received reports of a few minor regressions, which we are working on, but almost all of the feedback is quite good. So far, we have over 13,000 tracked downloads for this beta and the numbers are growing (somewhat more slowly than at other times because of the holiday season). The media reports I saw are fairly OK, though the note comes through that we're not up to feature parity with Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3 on all accounts, which we know, but we also should be doing better there than SeaMonkey 1.1.x in comparison to Firefox 2.0 and Thunderbird 2.0, so we are on the right track.
Actually, there are only two major features we miss that we want to ship in SeaMonkey 2.0 that are not present in this beta yet, and that is tabbed mail and a reworked Mac theme. Both are being worked on right now, in their final touches and review phase, and hopefully landing soon. Other than that, all that's left is making the experience rounder and fixing some annoyances and bugs, everything else is topping on the cake.
SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 already works and feel so much better than 1.1.x in so many ways that it's really time for us to push for releasing as soon as we can, even if that means pushing some nice-to-have things to the next version. We don't have to be concerned about not doing everything in 2.0, as this version already more than warrants its major version jump. There will be a next release after it that can improve many more things, and the solid add-ons platform even makes 2.0 able to be improved a lot by itself.
I hope everyone of you will support and help us to get a great final as soon as reasonably possible for us!

As a side note, thanks to Matthias "matti" Versen for caring about out add-ons blocklist and trying it keep it up to date in the future!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 29/2009 (July 13 - 19, 2009):

• Build System and Release Harness:
  After some poking of release drivers, I could land the Mac unpacking fix on 1.9.1 so that L10n repackaging of Mac comm-1.9.1 nightlies and 2.0b1 builds could work. The botched checkin of the equivalent for release tools was fixed as well, so now we should be able to reliably unpack DMGs everywhere (would have been easier if Apple wouldn't create commandline tools that act asynchronously).
  We found a good solution for automatically removing debug UI from beta and final releases and I landed that also in time for Beta 1.
  When starting to run release automation I found out about a version bump problem with the release tools and created a patch to handle our special case.
• Release Process:
  The really big thing this week was working on the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release itself. The tracking bug and the Build Notes have a good amount of the story of how it went. I did run into a few small issues, including one obscure error that looks like a machine issue with one VM, but the release automation work done in the last weeks turned out to have been almost perfect, as that part performed like a charm. We have builds for Windows, Linux and Mac in 17 languages now, as well as partial and complete updates (for US English, we didn't have any localized versions before) and we are all set for release from that point of view.
• SeaMonkey Project Website:
  I needed to come up with some new things for the 2.0 Beta 1 download page, as this is the first time we ship localized builds, and while I was at that, I included some small style improvements to the overall site, like highlighting headers when they are direct targets in the called URL.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Some significant work went into the opt-in process for the beta, where I took the time to do a fast productization review of all opted in revisions, which proved to be interesting as I also got to see all the websites of those locales that use custom homepages or bookmarks. We ended up with 15 locales opting in, one of which (hu) has over 450 obsolete strings which I disliked for releasing as official, but the others looked just good. One (pt-PT) had a complete and looking-good localization but failed to opt in. Because of that, we'll release the beta in 15 official languages (including en-US) and offer hu and pt-PT as "unofficial" one with a note that they didn't fully meet quality and formal requirements for official builds at this time.
• Various Discussions:
  Various version changes on websites and tools to support 2.0b2pre and 2.1a1pre nightlies, landing support for various shortcut keys in download manager, progress window accessibility, tabmail, getting old "-tbox" slaves into new buildbot pools, mac theme work, real and unreal FF 3.5 (Gecko 1.9.1) exploit reports, Gecko/platform 1.9.2 planning and SeaMonkey/Thunderbird, etc.

Apart from one strange issue that appears to be related to a single VM in our build machine pool, creation of the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release went really smoothly, and I'm really excited to see this version hit the public in 15+2 languages (see above), probably today or tonight. Even thought there are 20 language packs available to be used for 1.1.17, we never had any release that had official localized builds, and never had any version that had fully builds available in such a number of languages right from the start. We really can be proud of starting the beta phase of SeaMonkey 2.0 with that achievement, even though the collection of languages shows pretty much how Europe-centric our project is - I hope more parts of the world will join in for the next beta and for the stable releases.
In addition to that localization story, the first Beta offers the same Gecko and platform as Firefox 3.5.1, the completely reworked download manager, feed preview including better feed subscription, customizable mail toolbar, mail archiving and many more features and fixes in addition to all the good things we already had in the alphas - about 130 fixes were done just in SeaMonkey-specific code since Alpha 3, many more come from mail/news code shared with Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 and the Gecko/platform code we additionally share with Firefox 3.5.1.

I hope this beta release will be remarkable not just for our team, but also for all of you out there!

I ran into strange problems with the Mac builds of SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 (a step in the process that works flawlessly everywhere else hangs with very strange errors), but that shouldn't stop us from starting tests on the other two platforms that have builds available now.

So, please help us testing the available Windows installers and Linux packages, both available in 17 languages including US English!

I hope to sort out the Mac problems ASAP, we'll have disk images when those are solved and will get updates ready on the testing channels once all platforms have builds ready.

Update: Mac disk images are now available for all languages as well.

Update #2: Updates are available on the betatest channel.

If you have the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 Schedule in mind, you know that by now, all the code and strings are fully frozen for this release, all we are waiting for is for additional L10n opt-ins until their deadline of midnight Pacific time today.

10 locales have opted in so far, 8 of those (be, de, fr, gl, pl, ru, sk, tr) are good to go, the other two (ca and hu) are not green on dashboard due to obsolete strings, they should just remove those and are good to go as well.

13 locales are green on dashboard, so 5 of those haven't opted in yet (cs, es-AR, lt, nb-NO, pt-PT) - if yours is one of them, please tell us which revision to use for release in the opt-in thread on the mozilla.dev.l10n group/list - 2 more locales (es-ES and nl) have just a handful of missing strings and also could make this release easily, but any opt-in needs to be there until midnight Pacific time, remember that. (The remaining 7 locales on dashboard, ja/ja-JP-mac, ka, pt-BR, ro, si, sv-SE, need a good amount of work to get ready, any locale not on dashboard yet please follow the process outlined in our wiki to get on for future releases.)

For me, this release will be special not only because we finally can release official localized builds and do that in sync with the en-US builds, but also because we'll be using release automation for the first time, the same hg- and buildbot-based tools Firefox is using for their releases. I just checked in a fix for repackaging localized builds on Mac, so all that tooling we need should be there and working now, but it's the first live run, so far I only did test runs of those tools. They will provide us with partial updates as well (for en-US only, as that's the only language for which we have an earlier release), so we have a number of firsts in this release from a build and release management point of view.

Of course, that only complements the firsts we have in the source, we have the same platform and web functionality as Firefox 3.5 (including the 3.5.1 security updates), the same mail and newsgroups backend as Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 3 and about 130 SeaMonkey-specific fixes upcoming in this release.

I will start release automation early in the morning tomorrow, so localizers, remember to opt in today, and testers (including L10n testers!) be ready for candidate builds being available later in the day tomorrow (including updates on the betatest channel)!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 28/2009 (July 6 - 12, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build/Release Harness:
  A series of patches for buildbot tooling concerning L10n repackaging and release automation for comm-central applications got reviews and landed during a Mozilla maintenance window (to ensure that Firefox machines would be undisturbed). I also landed configuration files for SeaMonkey release automation, so that we are mostly ready for using that harness for 2.0 Beta 1.
  The Mac unpackaging fix needs to land on 1.9.1 (I could land it on mozilla-central already and it performs well there) and the same for release tools needs to land correctly before we are fully ready.
  I also could do Phase II of switching new buildbot configs to production, now the SeaMonkey waterfall has builds based on mozilla-central, while the default builds based on 1.9.1 are on the SeaMonkey2.0 page.
  The fix for trunk Mac builds landed before doing that, as did the fix by Neil that also made the nightly update breakage go away, so things looked quite good for the trunk builds from the beginning, though I needed to switch off tests for Windows nightlies and enlarge the timeout for making build symbols to get the nightlies for Windows going there.
  In addition to all that, I did a patch for automatically removing debug UI from beta and final releases, which should land soon and be in place for Beta 1.
• Release Process:
  Continued uploading a few remaining contributed builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.17.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  We could add Turkish to the SeaMonkey trunk locales, so that we now have 25 languages listed there, including US English. It will be interesting to see how many of them make the first automated simultaneous localized release in SeaMonkey history (2.0 Beta 1).
• German L10n:
  I kept up with the late-l10n change of the download manager prefs and mailnews search so that de should be good for beta 1.
• Various Discussions:
  Adding 2.1a1pre to AMO, DEL and other keys in download manager, Download manager pref panel, tabmail, getting Beta 1 into shape, etc.

It looks like Beta 1 might finally just fall into place nicely, even thought we are still tracking an issue with history import from 1.x builds, we now have a clue on how it could be fixed in toolkit code (mozilla-central appears to be fixed), but it might just not make the 2.0b1 build cutoff, unfortunately. We'll deal with that in this week's SeaMonkey Status Meeting and we'll re-evaluate if we can ship with that bug and just relnote it or if we need to have it fixed (we did ship Alpha 3 with this bug, apparently). For everything else, we look good for freezing Beta 1 this Tuesday and start builds for it later this week, making them available for testing. I hope you all will help to do that testing and hopefully clear the builds for an important milestone release, which will be the first time that we'll offer official localized release builds for all major platforms.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 27/2009 (June 29 - July 5, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build/Release Harness:
  Phase I of switching new buildbot configs to production has been done, official nightlies are now coming from those.
  Automated updates stopped working, probably because of the first step for Phase II, using a different version number for mozilla-central builds, for which I apparently made a somewhat incomplete patch checked in.
  I also fixed up making repack independent of ChatZilla or venkman being enabled just before that large switch.
  The small patch for installer dealing with "pretty names" finally got into the tree, and I did put up a patch for a small fix for trunk Mac builds Mark pointed me to.
• Release Process:
  Continued uploading contributed builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.17.
• German L10n:
  Fixed some mailnews strings to keep the de locale green.
• Various Discussions:
  Talk on open source project management at an event of the local IT branch of the chamber of commerce, DEL and other keys in download manager, Download manager pref panel, tabmail, Firefox 3.5 release, etc.

We finally have a schedule for SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1, freezes are already happening and things are progressing nicely towards making the goal of shipping this beta within the current month. We had an unfortunately row of delays, not all of them self-inflicted, since the last alpha, but this major step to a fully revamped SeaMonkey is now coming near.