The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 38/2010 (September 20 - 26, 2010):

• Build Machines and System:
  After our Windows builds had been broken with yet another problem of us not building libxul, Mark Banner bit the bullet and made SeaMonkey and Thunderbird build on libxul by default and on all our build machines. I then worked on cleaning out old builds and making packaging fit with that change.
  Based on that work, I worked on enabling Plugin Crash Detection (Out of process plugins) for SeaMonkey and succeeded. But then, we found out that universal builds were broken due to PPC not enabling that feature, it had build problems, for which I had to do several iterations of patches until it was fixed.
  Those switches also came out with linking a debug libxul needing a real lot of RAM, esp. on Linux, and so we needed to request increasing memory on build machines, which was mostly done, but brought up other problems, like the Parallels host not being able to support that much RAM on VMs and one build machine being down now as a result. Due to that, we had hiccups in the whole system, as even the build master runs on that host, and some some Mac minis are missing right now after reboots and we need Mozilla IT to manually tackle them. I hope everything turns out alright in the end, but it's another sign of how fragile our build machine pools are at the moment. I'm working on improvements, though, but need to convince the heads of Mozilla to help us there.
• Data Manager:
  Ian did his reviews on Data Manager, we filed some more followup bugs, and I fixed up some things in the code, but in the end, this feature that IMHO makes SeaMonkey stand out somewhat could land and is a part of SeaMonkey now!
• OpenSearch:
  OpenSearch support got reviews from Karsten after I did another iteration of the patch. Now I'm waiting on super-review before being able to land that as well, which I hope can still be done before this week's string freeze for SeaMonkey 2.1b1, so localizers will adapt to this now for the first beta instead of their work getting broken later on.
• Personas:
  My patch for making sidebar look good with Personas got reviews and could land, so browser windows should look good with lightweight themes in the upcoming beta.
• Places:
  When I landed places bookmarks, I unintentionally gave us a broken Move Bookmarks dialog. I finally found out what was wrong and fixed that.
• German Community:
  I added a few more people to Planet Mozilla (de), I hope more will join this in the upcoming times.
• Various Discussions:
  JavaScript speed and my Mandelbrot demo, SeaMonkey Development Meeting, visit to Bay Area and Mozilla HQ, resolving gcc 4.5 issues, Firefox add-on bar, doorhangers, 2.1b1 freeze and adding another beta, Mozilla web task force and domain name strategy, etc.

A lot of great things are happening right now that should make SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 a really compelling milestone for testing what's upcoming for our next stable release - and that one will be surely be the best application suite we ever delivered, as it should be.
Next week I'll be on a mission to improve cooperation with Mozilla Corporation and visit / work from their headquarters in Mountain View, and I also hope to be able to start creation of our Beta 1 builds from there, which we should still release before most of our major contributor meet face to face here in Vienna.

Interesting times we're living in, indeed!

Nach einem Abend mit interessanten Gesprächen, gewässertem Pils - äh, Kölsch - und sehr gutem Essen ging's relativ früh zurück ins Hotel und ab ins Bett, schließlich wollten wir um 9 in der Früh fit und bereit zu weiteren Diskussionen im Tagungsraum sein.

Dort ging's ans Eingemachte - nach Vorträgen und Präsentationen am Vortrag war dies der Tag der Arbeiten und Entscheidungen. Vorerst war mal zu klären, was wir mit der Domain mozilla.de machen wollten, alle waren sich einig, der die aktuelle Weiterleitung auf die deutsche mozilla-europe-Seite nicht ideal ist, sondern eher die Community-Seiten aller Produkte verlinkt werden sollten. Und auch sonst drehte sich alles darum, wie wir wohl die Community in bessere Kooperation bringen könnten. Deshalb wurde auch beschlossen, die Newsgroup mozilla.dev.l10n.de nicht nur bestehen zu lassen, sondern auch wieder mehr zu nutzen. Schließlich erarbeiteten wir in Gruppen und später wieder in der gesamten Runde unsere Top-5 Ziele für die nächsten 6 Monate. Alles in allem eine sehr fruchtbare Diskussion, die das Treffen gut abrundete - ich hoffe, wir können diese Ziele auch erreichen.

Schlussendlich ließen wir die Veranstaltung ausklingen, in dem wir gemeinsam warteten, bis die jeweiligen Transportmittel abfuhren, zuerst in einem Cafe am Domplatz, später an div. anderen Orten rund um den Dom - Rothaut und ich waren so ziemlich die letzte, die Köln wieder verließen, denke ich.

Zurück in Wien war ich zwar kräftig müde, aber konnte auf ein Wochenende zurück blicken, an dem ich viel gelernt habe, von neuen Gesichtern über Accessibility-Technologien bis zu den gemeinsam erarbeiteten Plänen für die deutsche Mozilla-Community. Eine Veranstaltung, die sich wirklich deutlich gelohnt hat!

Um 5 musste ich heute schon außer Haus, etwas früh für mich, der Arbeit bis 3 in der Nacht durchaus gewohnt ist - aber wichtiges stand am Programm - vorerst mal ein Flug von Wien nach Köln, um rechtzeitig zum Treffen der deutschsprachigen Community in der Rheinstadt zu sein.

Ich hatte das Privileg, unsere "Rothaut" auf dieser Reise zu begleiten, gemeinsam mit Thomas (Lendo) stellten wir Österreicher damit ein Sechstel der anwesenden Mozilla-Community-Mitglieder - ein respektabler Anteil in dieser Gruppe von hauptsächlich Übersetzern und Community-Betreuern der verschiedenen Aspekte des Mozilla-Projektes.

Wir fanden uns am Vormittag in der Lobby des Hotel Cristall wieder, das als Tagungsort fungieren sollte. Nach kleinem Umherirren rund um den riesigen Dom und damit verbundener Nahrungsaufnahme begann dann zurück in diesem Hotel unser eigentliches Erlebnis, wobei nach einigen technischen Wirren ich den Reigen der Vorträge mit SeaMonkey eröffnen durfte, und denke ich deutlich genug machen konnte, wie wichtig der deutsche Sprachraum für unser Projekt ist, und dass SeaMonkey 2.1 jedenfalls am aktuellen Stand ist.

Die Kollegen von den anderen Projekten haben jeweils die Situation ihres Teiles dargestellt, wobei ganz klar wurde, dass es doch gute Möglichkeiten geben müsste, zwischen verschiedenen Teilen enger zu kooperieren, um uns alle zu stärken. Besonders interessant fand ich Rothaut's Präsentation der Accessibility-Technologien - ich hatte schließlich noch nie einen Screen-Reader und eine Braillezeile in Aktion gesehen, und es war echt spannend, einen kleinen Einblick zu bekommen, wie Software und das Internet für jemand aussieht, der/die keinen Bildschirm verwenden kann.

Einige Neuheiten konnte ich sonst auch noch aufschnappen, wie die Existenz von auf deutsch übersetzen MDN-Seiten oder dass die deutsche Firefox-Version 10% der gesamten Benutzer-Anteile ausmacht, aber auch altbekanntes wie die fast zum "Running Gag" advancierende "Ressourcenknappheit".

Mittlerweile sind wir im Zielspurt des heutigen Nachmittags in einer Diskussion der Probleme bei den Mozilla-Übersetzungen, besonders im Bereich von div. Webseiten, angelangt, bevor wir uns zum Einchecken für die Übernachtung und dann zum Abendessen und gemütlichen Tagesausklang begeben.

Der Informationspart heute war sehr ergiebig, und ich hoffe, dass sich das in Einzelgesprächen heute noch fortsetzt - und morgen geht es dann zu den produktiven Diskussionen!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 36/2010 (September 6 - 12, 2010):

• Releases:
  Shipped SeaMonkey 2.0.7 on Tuesday but pulled updates soon after for a startup crash seen by a number of users, which stops them from even launching the application or getting further updates, so we went for rather safe than sorry and stopped updating the other half of users still on 2.0.6 and not yet having applied the update. We will create a 2.0.8 release soon with fixes for the crasher and then will deploy updates straight to that one.
  Given that, I worked on fixing one issue related to the crash, but there's a second one pending that affects Firefox and Thunderbird on the same platform version as well. I also readied us to take a mail signature fix along with that update.
• Build Machines:
  Just when that requirement landed, I got note that we need to install YASM on Windows slaves and upgrade other systems, so I set the time aside to do that, and after some investigation on how Firefox release engineering did that, could complete it successfully on all our machines. IT also once again was very fast and helpful when one slave decided to go missing on the network. Thanks for that!
• Automated tests:
  I landed the test for reusing empty tabs that I created the week before. Apart from that, I didn't get to look into a lot in that category, but Callek, IanN, Aqualon, and sgautherie have been quite busy there, which is nice to see, as the oranges come down to manageable numbers now.
• Places:
  After some more reviewing, the fast bookmarking button has been accepted and I could land it.
• Doorhanger notifications:
  I did another followup patch, this time for lightweight themes installation, but given that Neil seems to have decided to rewrite the system, I'm seriously thinking of throwing the towel on the whole stack of bugs and patches, unless he'll backport all this work to Firefox as well.
• UA string:
  After doing a Council vote on including a Firefox token by default in our UA string, and that vote running positive, I got reviews and checked this in.
• Data Manager:
  After addressing Neil's last super-review comments, I uploaded a new version 1.0.2 to AMO with those improvements.
  Ian came around with some review comments on Data Manager, but from a first glimpse, either his build has problems or my code does. Need to find out about that.
• OpenSearch:
  After a number of additional hours spent on it, OpenSearch support has a patch up for review, but it looks like some points of my work are controversial and it will take some time to agree on something there, I fear. I filed a few followup bugs for things this first patch doesn't cover.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, visit to Bay Area and Mozilla HQ, building with libxul and/or "fatlibxul", organizational future for SeaMonkey, more prompts converted to doorhangers, JavaScript speed and JaegerMonkey, message account wizard, Firefox UI work, etc.

We had a few messages recently about JavaScript speed and SeaMonkey, and it's quite fitting to those that the new "JaegerMonkey" method tracing just landed on the developement "trunk" and our nightlies this weekend. Out of personal interest and for calming people who fear we wouldn't work on speed, I did some runs of the popular SunSpider benchmark today. While the SeaMonkey 1.1.19 versions with which we announced the end of the line for the 1.x series comes in at 17501ms in that benchmark on my machine, a current SeaMonkey 2.0.x build comes in at 1738ms with the JS debugger enabled (default) and 1402ms with it disabled, which is a huge improvement - but just the baseline for current work. Now, today's pre-2.1 SeaMonkey build again just takes about a third of that baseline time and lands at 477ms - and the JaegerMonkey work isn't even finished yet. I think we are moving in the right direction.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 35/2010 (August 30 - September 5, 2010):

• Build Machines:
  I fixed the missing L10n nightlies by applying a trick the Firefox build engineers team told me about - all locales that build right now should have nightlies out for all platforms again.
  When I noticed that two machines were missing, I filed a bug and IT promptly got them back to work for us - thanks for that!
• Automated tests:
  While a few other people in our team are churning along to reduce our test failures, I only helped marginally with this effort this week - but when one fix landed and didn't have the wanted effect, I investigated that a bit, wrote a test specifically for the new issue we're seeing and found out what the actual problem there is - we're still discussing a solution.
  I did create a patch to only build Web Console for Firefox, which should make our test failures there go away - if it gets accepted.
• Places:
  I did one more patch for cleaning up the places library, reverting theming for some parts to ease getting it reviewed.
  The fast bookmarking button got some more review comments and finally got as far as being OKed for the Classic theme, so I updated it for mac and Modern as well. The star button nit backport got review, I requested approval to land.
  The Mac problem of bookmarks being broken when no windows are open is solved after some more teamwork between Stefan and me.
• Doorhanger notifications:
  While the main patch is still waiting for review, I updated the followup on add-on installation notifications following some more Firefox work. I also filed a bug for "Learn more" on geolocation notifications, but I won't work on it while the rest is still in limbo.
• UA string:
  I did a patch for the somewhat controversial change of including a Firefox token by default in our UA string, after I realized the fight for this has been lost. There will be a UI pref in the advanced panels, and some don't believe this fight is over and want to prolong needless fighting, but I think this change needs to be done and the discussion ended if we don't want to continue losing users over this.
• Data Manager:
  From what I can see, the updates to the Data Manager patch and the review comments seem to get very close to final with respect to Neil's super-review. Now all I'm waiting for is the official marking of that and Ian's actual review.
• Site-specific zoom:
  I updated the patch for remembering zoom per site after I found out how to mitigate errors I had earlier and requested reviews now, but that might just be stalled for using a controversial event right now, which Neil just doesn't like to see at all in our code.
• OpenSearch:
  One thing that comes up time and again when users try to use it unsuccessfully and ask in our channels is OpenSearch support. This has been stalling for a long time basically just because we now have crufty, badly documented binary code around for search and a sidebar of which we don't know usage but which is crafted around a model that is far away from OpenSearch and not even fitting the current code.
  After we have decided some weeks ago that we'll set no priority on the sidebar working, I finally bit the bullet and tried to get our code to work with toolkit's OpenSearch module and so far, it has been easier than I thought - even though we are still missing a few things in my current WIP patch. I also did a very rough WIP for an optional search bar, but that needs a lot more work and isn't as high a priority as the main OpenSearch patch.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, SeaMonkey build machines, visit to Bay Area and Mozilla HQ, building with libxul and/or "fatlibxul", organizational future for SeaMonkey, etc.

Esp. in the first half of this week I've been under a lot of strain, and generally I'm badly overworked and having too many things I think I need to take care of, resulting in symptoms that are very much pointing in the direction of an oncoming burn-out. At the same time, I'm trying to organize or help organize a few things that in the short term cause me some additional stress for planning, but should relief a lot of stress and frustration in the end. I hope that all will help my sanity somewhat (in the mean time - sorry when I might overreact at times) and help the SeaMonkey project to improve significantly in the future.