The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 34/2010 (August 23 - 29, 2010):

• Releases:
  Finally released SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 this week, after spending a few hours on readying relnotes and the announcement.
  Shortly after that, I started off the release process for the 2.0.7 security update, which is now available in candidate builds and on the "beta" update channel.
• Build Machines:
  An issue with Windows L10n repacks turned out to be a conflict with pre-existing trees on the machines, I clobbered all boxes to fix it.
  I also investigated some missing L10n nightlies and should have a fix very soon now.
• Build System:
  The small packaging fixes reported last week could land, just like those for jsperf (covered by a test).
  Later in the week, I worked on and fixed the reporter removal and the new Addon Repository prefs.
  I also did some more investigation of building with libxul and filed bugs on S/MIME bustage and import linking failure with this enabled.
• Automated tests:
  The test I created based on some WIP code from Frank for the FAYT / Findbar focus issue was reviewed and I could land it so we should catch possible regressions there.
  I couldn't take much of a look into out test oranges, but some other people thankfully did and some are being fixed - but it looks like others are being added as well.
• Places:
  The rest of the first batches of Firefox backports of Neil's review comments have been reviewed, approved and landed, so we're one bug down on those. The bug for cleaning up the places library is probably up for a longer story, as the scope bar part might not live up to theming expectations yet.
  The fast bookmarking button went through some review and also is up for some backporting, I updated the SeaMonkey patch and hope to get this integrated soon. Building on that, I'd like to convert the editing panel in the browser to an arrow panel later on to make it feel more logical and fluid in usage.
  And on Mac, the places bookmarks stuff doesn't work when no windows open, which needed some fixes on the Mac-specific "hidden windows" that serves their window-independent menu in that case.
• Smaller Work:
  I don't feel for doing an own bullet point for each of them, so here's a few smaller items:
  I updated the doorhanger notifications patch once again for some review comments, I hope it finally gets somewhere.
  On the ongoing user agent discussions, I finally abandoned the utopia of getting clean as-they-should-be UA strings when Minefield decided to switch to a "Firefox" UA, taking away the majority of technically potent people testing the non-Firefox-branded Gecko web. Still, as I'm for doing things fully or not at all, I concluded no Gecko should be delivered without "Firefox" in the UA and filed a bug for an automation of that. This was WONTFIXED and I guess we'll stay where we are in the end, so we'll probably solve this on SeaMonkey with the UI pref and a default to "on" for now.
• Data Manager:
  Once again, I updated the Data Manager patch for recent review comments, of course only to trigger more of those never-ending review comments and a negative super-review based on a crash I can't investigate, reproduce or debug and which very probably isn't my fault or in my code. In the end, that might just be what will stall this feature indefinitely. I still filed a bug on correctly listing IDN.
• Themes:
  I updated my LCARStrek and EarlyBlue themes for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 on Sunday to not leave users of this milestone empty-handed when it comes to theming - though they now have personas as well, of course.
• German L10n:
  I created and updated a beta channel version of the German language pack for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3, so that people can test this release in German language as well if they like or need to.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, SeaMonkey build machines, work on final look for new addons manager, visit to Bay Area and Mozilla HQ, probable PPC end-of-line, status bar, etc.

Our statistics on active daily SeaMonkey 2.x installations have been stagnating since the start of the holiday period in July, but this last week have been returned to increasing significantly, and on Saturday, we had our over-a-week average going over 90,000 active daily installations, just to have the single-day value break the 100k barrier the first time ever two days later, i.e. yesterday.
This is an important milestone to hit and tells us we're going strong, but what I'd really like is to have ten times that number, i.e. a million people starting SeaMonkey 2.x every day. Can we hit that? Can you talk 9 more people into using SeaMonkey 2.x? If each of our users can, we should be able to make it - in theory. Will you take the challenge?

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 33/2010 (August 16 - 22, 2010):

• Releases:
  We're still in the release process for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3, this week I did a respin for a second build, and later regenerated updates to fix broken Linux update files.
• Build Machines:
  After doing the Mac ones two weeks ago, I also upgraded the Windows slaves to buildbot 0.8 this week, now only the master is left on the older version and can be upgraded whenever we're ready.
  On our update configs, I applied a small fix that was done for Firefox as well.
  When working on the buildbots and also the failed updates, I decided to update the buildmaster to the most-current buildbotcustom code we share with Firefox and Thunderbird builders, and unfortunately introduced two temporary breakages: The log encoding change needed to be reverted because I couldn't figure out the breakage, the test triggering failure could be solved with some tweaks, including a cleanup on Linux slaves.
• Build System:
  After I had driven it for some time, I finally landed Neil's fix(es) for xpfe autocomplete building with libxul, which now makes its building being driven from the comm-central side as well, and leaves the the only build breakage of --enable-libxul being in LDAP.
  For future major updates from SeaMonkey 2.0 to 2.1 (and probably later ones), it's necessary to send a better platform identifier to the update server, so that we only offer major updates to platforms supported for the newer version - I created a patch and landed it on both 2.0 and 2.1 trees.
  The Windows installer needed some changes after being made ready for the future "omnijar" packaging, I fixed a small glitch in the SeaMonkey installer fix that had generously been generated by mwu, who created the Firefox work as well.
  A related patch for jar reordering needed a change to config.mk, which I applied to comm-central as well - including a fixup of the command so that L10n packaging works as well.
  And as part of my test investigation work (see below), I checked package-compare and found a few small glitches, for which I created a patch.
• Automated tests:
  I filed a number of bugs about failures in our tests this week and investigated some some them. All our perma-oranges are hopefully filed now, the fix for one was a places issue (see there), for another, packaging one more new file. The others still need work, and help is wanted. Let's drive our tree to a green state - after Neil has fixed our long-going tabs leak, we can do it much more easily!
  I also reactivated the ID test for DOM Inspector after it had been deactivated when inspector was broken.
• Places:
  My followup patches for Neil's post-landing review comments, cleaning up a lot of the bookmarks code, esp. in the manager, could all land after some additional iterations and fixes. One more followup to that is now on file, dealing with access key problems.
  For the Firefox side, I tested and uploaded a patch for cleaning up the places library, which ports the applicable parts of Neil's comments back to Firefox code.
  Our ID check test found that we were including a bookmark key twice on Mac and Windows, which I fixed by removing the platform-specific binding and using the same, general, one on all platforms.
  I also had a few discussions on the add/edit bookmarks panel in the browser, now leading me to believe this should actually be an arrow panel pointing to a bookmark icon in the url bar - which I had left out in my original patches, but now sounds like an even better idea than before, showing if a page is already bookmarked and giving a fast (one-click) bookmarking option. To make the story short, I created a patch for this fast bookmarking button now.
• Tabbed Browsing:
  While it may seem slightly unrelated, the patch I created and landed for getBrowser() in mailnews is part of some work I'm doing for the browser to enable site-specific zoom settings, for which I attached a WIP patch that works but generates a strange error when used on the mailnews side.
• Data Manager:
  I updated the Data Manager patch for recent review comments, and of course, this only triggered a new round of comments. I also filed followup bugs for further work once this one has landed.
• Various Discussions:
  reviews, l10n.mk for Thunderbird, SeaMonkey Development Meeting, user agent string changes, SeaMonkey build machines, GSoC closing up and final evaluations, Firefox TabCandy, work on final look for new addons manager, etc.

This has been a really busy week for me - actually, when writing this up today, it looks even more busy then it felt while it was underway. Unfortunately, we didn't get as far as I hoped on the third alpha, but I hope we'll be able to push it out to the public in the next few days, so our full concentration can be on the beta development cycle. A lot of work has already happened, and some more stuff is underway - both in SeaMonkey-specific code and in the platform, so it feels really great to be in the project right now - even if not always everyone agrees on specifics, but I'm sure we can work out a lot of that to a degree where we all can be happy. And where we still diverge in what we want - well, that what prefs and add-ons are for, after all!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 32/2010 (August 9 - 15, 2010):

• Releases:
  After the code freeze for 2.1a3 on Wednesday morning, I did some release driving, finally kicking off the first builds for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 - but we already found at least two issues we need to solve in a respin.
• Build Machines:
  Did some manual time adjustments and finally filed a bug for getting some NTP access again for the build machines. I guess the buildmaster sees how much more work than the available slaves can bare it has to do, so it squeezes an additional minute into every day, but in the end that's not too helpful, given the rest of the world doesn't agree with that.
• Bustages:
  We had to fight a few bustages this week, I landed fixes for two mozilla-central-caused compile problems (patches not done by me) and worked up a fix for a ChatZilla-related Mac problem to get things going again.
• Tabbed Browsing:
  The patch for wrong tabs loading icons as well as the one for loading favicon.ico for bookmarks/history if the right pref is set could both land for 2.1a3, the former fixed a really nasty tabbrowser bug I'm glad we have caught. Unfortunately, I introduced a new bug with this patch, but Serge jumped in and fixed that thankfully.
• Places:
  After the main patch landed late the week before, I could also get the Modern theme fixes in so things don't look too extremely ugly there for Alpha 3, even if some general work is still to be done for later mailestones and final.
  I could also land parts of the review comment backports to Firefox, which is nice for both of our products.
  I also worked on addressing a number of post-landing review comments by Neil, which will result in some nice cleanup of the code.
• German L10n:
  As I'm planning to put up another language pack for 2.1a3, I did put some work into the German locale, bringing it up to the current state of trunk, which funnily required a number of string for my own landed patches like lightweight themes and places bookmarks, but I adopted a good number of those from Firefox.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, user agent string changes, possible organization for SeaMonkey, upcoming trip to Mozilla HQ, NNTP and Thunderbird, venkman and SeaMonkey 2.1, putting debugQA on AMO, omnijar, places landing aftermath, Mozilla websites, async redirects and high-profile add-ons, shape of the tree, etc.

Post-places landing talks, planning for the future, and driving SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 ate up a lot of this week, so doorhanger notifications and Data Manager stagnated mostly, but I hope to pick up work on those this week again.
That said, despite some regressions that need a respin and places bookmarks definitely having some rough edges, this upcoming last alpha sounds like it will be a very great one, showing up a really good number of new things and making a stand for this project moving forward significantly.
That said, your testing and feedback is needed and wanted very much!

Back in June, I wondered if the whole year might be travel-free for me - the good news is that it won't. After 10 months of being here in Austria, I'll get back to meeting other Mozilla contributors again.

The story behind that earlier blog post has not gone away though, black clouds are still hanging over my head, but one of those upcoming trips might lift those a bit as well, I hope. After all, that's a good reason why a number of developer meetings are done, as kernel developer Ted Ts'o puts it:
There's still a month to go, but first, I'll be at a German community meetup in Cologne in September, and I'm really looking forward to meeting those folks, even when talking German at a Mozilla meeting will feel strange. I also hope that the German-language Mozilla Planet will up up by then so that we'll make sure everyone there who has a blog will be syndicated there.

Two weeks after that, I'll take a trip to Mozilla headquarters and will be there or in and around the SF Bay Area from October 4 to 15th.
There will be a number of people to talk to regarding upcoming SeaMonkey plans, our position in the community and our dealings with the future of the Internet, but I should have enough time remaining to just hang around the office for some time and be available for all kinds of talk and chatter, so if you happen to be in MV or the Bay Area at that time, please tell me so we can set up something - or just catch me there. Also, if you have any personal ramblings with me, please take the chance so we can clear those things up in person - we don't have to love each other, but it would be good if we can get along, given we all are working for a better Internet and the overall Mozilla mission.

And probably a short time after that (we are still in negotiations about financing, etc. and have not confirmed the date yet), there will be a long-awaited meeting I won't have to travel to very far - we are planning for a SeaMonkey Developer Meeting with 20-25 people from our community right in Vienna, Austria (Wien, Österreich)!

I'm looking forward to meeting all those people at those different places, being productive in different directions, and getting thoughts to flow on how to tackle the future (well, "tackle" might be the wrong word, we're not in the defense here, but being offensive about it, so how about "receiving" it?) and I'll also very much enjoy the change of pace and places along with those events, as that almost always helps being creative and working for a better common future for all of us!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 31/2010 (August 2 - 8, 2010):

• Build Machines:
  I installed gcc 4.5.1 on the Linux build machines, this is being used on 64bit already and will be in the future on 32bit as well, but I'm waiting for the activation on Firefox there.
  On the Mac machines, I updated to buildbot 0.8, getting one step closer to switching the whole system over to this new version. While I was at it, I also did a lot of cleanup of the build tools on those Mac Minis.
• Tabbed Browsing:
  The tab bar appearance improvements could finally land, both the normal default theme as well as lightweight themes should look nicer there now.
  In the last weeks, since I landed my places icons work and looked more often at them, I noticed wrong tabs loading icons at times, after I was pointed to the same problem on IRC, I filed it and with some investigation even found the cause and a fix, which should still land for 2.1a3.
  Somewhat related, I filed a bug and patch for actually loading favicon.ico for bookmarks/history if the right pref is set, so that those people wanting the excessive search for icons on servers actually get a reward for the pain they cause webmasters.
• Doorhanger Notifications:
  There was yet another significant Firefox patch landing for those, I again updated the doorhanger notifications and add-on web installation notifications patches. Reviews are ongoing, but the focus of my efforts of getting reviews was on other things this week (see below).
• Data Manager:
  I did address a large part of the reviews on Data Manager and improved the code a lot, warranting, next to patch updates, an updated 1.0.1 version on AMO that now should perform much better for everyone and also fixes a number of bugs in 1.0, including the forget panel.
  Meanwhile, reviews are progressing in the bug report for integration into SeaMonkey, and the TraceMonkey bug that caused slowdowns is fixed for both Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 and the upcoming SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3, even though the current versions of the add-on on AMO work around it anyhow.
• Automated tests:
  As I really dislike how test failures on trunk are spreading instead of getting fixed, I filed a number of bugs on all the mochitest-plain and xpcshell test failures we are permanently seeing right now. Please help fixing those!
• Places:
  This week, I pushed really hard for getting the last mile of reviewing done for Places bookmarks, and after I did set up IanN for those, he put in an awesome session and cleared them all for landing! With the addition of Callek's review on some of the core and the tests, I could finally push them into the tree and today's nightlies are the first official builds with the new system, SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 will be the first released milestone to feature it.
  Sorry for everyone whose nerves I stretched over this, but I think having this in now was worth that.
  With that, I filed a bug for playing well with the search panel, as well as a strange JS inclusion issue - and fixing the Modern theme, for the latter, I also have a patch ready that's awaiting reviews.
  In addition, I worked on getting review comments backported to Firefox where applicable, so they profit from our work as well.
• German L10n:
  Again, I landed a patch for Michael Opitz with more help updates.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, German L10n contributor meeting, security bug, user agent string changes, possible organization for SeaMonkey, NNTP and mailing lists and Thunderbird discussions, venkman and SeaMonkey 2.1, the road to libxul, putting debugQA on AMO, SeaMonkey and NVDA, MPL update, update system, etc.

The really large milestone for me this week is of course the landing of places bookmarks after 5 months of working on it and waiting for reviews. There's some post-landing reviews going on and some followup work, but now we get tester feedback on the real thing and can push it out to more of them in the upcoming third alpha, which should go a long to way getting the testing and feedback we need to ship it in a good state in a final 2.1 release a few months from now.
There's a ton of other SeaMonkey work going on though right now, with all this busy hacking, I'm pretty sure that final release will be one to show off, and with some other plans that go on, this project should be heading for great things as a whole - stay tuned for more news on that in the next weeks and months!

\o/ \o/ It's done! \o/



Finally, after roughly 5 months of the patches being around, reviews have been completed and I could land the places bookmarks patch set (a total of 1.2 MB of diffs, about half of that removal of the old system) in SeaMonkey "trunk" today, which means 2.1a3pre nightlies starting with 20100809 and also the soon-to-come SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 will be based on the new system.

As mentioned before, this brings a number of improvements:

• Live bookmarks, i.e. displaying feeds as "virtual" bookmark folders,
• Microsummary support, or "live titles", allowing (optional) bookmark titles that are dynamically being updated with info from the website itself,
• Bookmark tagging as an additional possibility of organizing bookmarks,
• More robust storage for bookmarks (including good recovery options),
• "Smart folders", e.g. "recently bookmarked pages", as well as saving bookmarks queries as virtual folders,
• Bookmark icons are working much better and not being lost when they expire from the browser cache,
• More code sharing, meaning code will be actively maintained and developed, which hasn't been fully the case with the older code,
• Possibility to sync bookmarks (between different SeaMonkey installation, but also Firefox or Fennec ones) via Sync (will possibly even be integrated directly into SeaMonkey),
• Easier porting of bookmarks-related Firefox add-ons to SeaMonkey,
• And probably more.

I'll also repeat the list of noteworthy "feature losses" or changes compared to the old code:

• "Groupmarks" are being replaced by being able to open any bookmark folder in tabs (middle-clicking a folder title or selecting the "Open All in Tabs" entry from the folder display),
• The bookmarks.html file can still be exported to, even automatically at application shutdown, but it's not the main storage format any more. Most usages of the file can be replaced, including using it as the homepage (the sidebar panel can be set instead), but what doesn't work is switching between different bookmarks.html files as bookmarks sources. I strongly believe most use cases for that can be somewhat differently be achieved through the means of the places system, but we unfortunately don't yet have too good descriptions of those use cases and why this "feature" (I'd call it "misuse") is quite popular among a number of people.
• Sharing bookmarks.html between multiple installations doesn't work any more, but using Sync should bring almost the same experience.

There may be some rough edges left in the SeaMonkey integration, for example, the patch for making Modern work has just not been landed yet, I finished it just before I could land the rest, but I hope it will get reviews soon.
Also, I just heard that the code I added a few weeks ago to set site icons correctly so places can use them seems to have been broken meanwhile, so the bookmarks toolbar and probably menu and manager are missing many icons - that problem is probably in our tabbed browsing code, we'll investigate it ASAP and hope to fix still it for Alpha 3.

If you are testing nightlies or the upcoming alpha, and you see things that don't work like they should, please report bugs (make sure you set a dependency on the SMPlacesBMarks bug if it's related to this feature landing). We will try to fix all the problems we can - of course your help is appreciated there as well - so we will be able to ship a great SeaMonkey 2.1!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 30/2010 (July 26 - August 1, 2010):

• Tabbed Browsing:
  The patch to default SeaMonkey to tabbed browsing could land without larger problems, though we still need to look into fixing some tests, as this switch has uncovered some wrong expectations of tests and a shutdown leak. Some of that has been figured out (e.g. I fixed one test bug), but not yet all of those cases. Also, about:* pages now load in the background, which is unintuitive and something we should fix.
  The patch for improving tab bar look needed some more work, but the second iteration looks good on Windows as well now.
  I also did some work on remembering site-specific zoom, but it needs some tabbrowser work (and fixing up mailnews) to actually perform its function correctly.
• "About SeaMonkey" Tab:
  Tired of waiting for a toolkit bug to be fixed, I finished up and landed our own version of about:, with the necessary privileges to link release notes and the SeaMonkey website, and with the possibility to be extended with other things provided in "About" windows in e.g. Firefox and Thunderbird.
• Doorhanger Notifications:
  After recent review comments and more patches landing in Firefox, I updated the doorhanger notifications patch, and also filed a bug and patch for using them for add-on web installation notifications. Reviews are ongoing, I hope we can resolve this as well soon, esp. the latter patch improves the experience with the new add-on manager significantly.
• Data Manager:
  Data Manager 1.0 could be released now - unfortunately, I did break the forget panel there and there are a few other glitches I found as well as some significant code rework.
  The reason I did find all that is that I submitted a patch for integration in SeaMonkey and review feedback proved to be quite helpful. Also, I finally sat down and wrote an automated browser-chrome test for almost all of its functionality (took almost all Sunday), so things like a broken forget panel will be detected in the future (and it uncovered a few small glitches while being written)!
  The install from AMO will be upgraded to a version 1.0.1 with all those improvements once I've worked through all the remaining review comments, updated the code for it and ported that to the add-on version.
  As a funny incident, the investigation of a performance issue finally led me to a recent regression in TraceMonkey that meant that sorting the lists in Data Manager is really slow when JavaScript is "optimized" in the buggy versions (with include Firefox 4 Beta 2 and current nightlies of both Firefox and SeaMonkey) but at least we caught this in time before it annoyed a larger number of users.
• Places:
  Places bookmarks are moving along! After ranting a bit and urging for reviews or otherwise getting it in for a3 in the SeaMonkey meeting, I did put up Ian as additional reviewer on all but core - and he definitely made a light appear at the end of the tunnel - now it's up to Neil to show me it's the actual opening or an oncoming train.
  Seriously, he's working on the reviews to the new places core, and with some luck, this all can land before the weekend and go out to testers in 2.1a3!
  If that's really to happen, it would lift a lot of weight off my shoulders and bring SeaMonkey bookmark handling fully up to par with Firefox, which would really be great. I hope we won't have too much fallout problems or regressions from this, but then, alphas and betas are there to get the required testing to fix those before shipping a final.
  I also created a shell script to diff ports against original files and submitted the script and the diffs to relevant bugs.
• German L10n:
  Micheal Opitz did some more help updates, which I landed for him.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, German L10n contributor meeting, security bug, user agent string changes, possible organization for SeaMonkey, L20n, NNTP and mailing lists and Thunderbird discussions, venkman and SeaMonkey 2.1, the road to libxul, watching Firefox's app tabs and Tab Candy work, etc.

This week has been another very active one, esp. for me - landing tabbed browsing defaults and then getting Data Manager into that state where it can be reviewed, following those review comments, and writing the test was already tremendous progress, but also seeing those places bookmarks reviews progress really made my week. If things continue this way, I'm really looking forward to handing a really exciting third alpha for 2.1 to those testers this month, as it will really show off that we are on the move!