The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 14/2010 (April 5 - 11, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  Partial updates for nightlies could be actually made working after fixing the regression I introduced on first try. For any 1-day update jump on trunk nightlies of any locale, you should now get partials via the automated update service, only larger jumps need to go through complete updates now.
  In all that work, I also updated the community update server to current AUS code so that our matches all the features of the "official" one again.
  Once again, I also upgraded our buildbot master to current buildbotcustom code to make sure everything continues to work smoothly there.
  Not enough with that, I also turned on test packaging for optimized "dep" builds on trunk so it's easier to download and run the tests yourself, even without building on your own machine.
  Once again, I also did some build system reviews, and discussed a few test failures in bugs.
  As a fallout from the update discussions, I filed a bug on updating our AUS URL. And before I got to ranting more that it's not easy nowadays to keep our build machine configs on par with the Firefox ones, I filed a bug for making it easier again.
• Bug Triage:
  I already posted last week on possible triaging targets, but this week I did take another look of what we could do to deal with bugs more easily and in the end proposed expiring bugs that had been mass-unconfirmed 10 months ago and had no comments since then. That step would make it easier for our small community to concentrate on bugs that had some activity since our project has been started.
  There also will be a Mozilla bugday on SeaMonkey "General" bugs, which should be checked and probably moved to a more appropriate component.
• Internal Help Content:
  As the whole interface change had been introduced by me, I volunteered on this week's SeaMonkey meeting to update help for places history and did that work later in the week, wondering how little work it actually required.
  While I was on the topic, I realized I also should tend to a related trunk-only help change.
• Places:
  Some side discussion came up when it was discovered that some related part that wasn't really needed there but which I included in my making icons work WIP patch was actually useful elsewhere - and possibly rather now than post-places-bookmarks. I urged people to decouple issues as far as possible, and if we really need this now, implement it in a separate bug.
  On the main places bookmarks patchset, there's not much to tell, other than the recent try builds are being reported to work nicely. More testing wanted!
  Meanwhile, I filed bugs on getting some tests in place, updating help and UI prefs updates, which all can be done after the core of the work itself.
• Various Discussions:
  Build system reviews, test failures, bugday, Google Summer of Code, tabbrowser APIs, Firefox tabs-on-top experiment, SeaMonkey 2.1 progress, etc.

I'm continuing and intensifying my thinking about how we can get more people to help the SeaMonkey project. We desperately need help in marketing, support, design and bug triage areas - which all are not tied to very in-deep code knowledge but even easy to work on without any programming knowledge. If you can help us out there, please contact us - and if you know someone who can help us, please spread the word!