07.12.10
Posted in Camino
at 4:49 pm
by Smokey
As I alluded to last month, I’ve been in a bit of a posting malaise for some time, so it has been a while since the last Camino update (let alone the last regular Camino update) here.
At the time of our last “regular” update, we were very close to shipping nightlies off of Gecko 1.9.2 and also releasing the Camino 2.0.3 security and stability update. Both of those have since happened.
Since then, we’ve been hard at work on driving the bugs blocking Camino 2.1 Alpha 1 to zarro and readying the release of Camino 2.0.4, another security and stability update. Stuart Morgan updated our Sparkle pull, went on a tear cleaning up deprecated function usage, and started attacking thorny 2.1 bugs, Gecko regressions, and revivified Flash crashes that we’d previously worked around. As a result, we’re sitting at only one blocker for 2.1a1: some continuing performance issues with the new autocomplete. In addition, Stuart pretty much single-handedly got Camino building off of mozilla-central, before we were slammed into a brick wall of embedding-unfriendly code and massive Gecko platform changes landing after the platform had reached the beta stage!
I’ve been working on fixing assorted small bugs here and there, including some changes to our AppleScript dictionary and a long-standing bug with selections in the Save dialogues (thanks to a tip from Wevah). I’ve also worked on shepherding patches into the tree—both for 2.0.4 and Gecko fixes we needed for 2.1—and have done some debugging of other bugs, old and new. In addition, I coordinated the upstreaming of Camino’s crash reporter client localizations back to the Google Breakpad project and reviewed several of Stuart’s build- and update-related patches.
So that’s more or less where we stand in mid-July. We’ll hopefully have 2.0.4 out by the end of the month, and 2.1a1 not too long after that (free time permitting). As always, if you’re interested in helping out, come find us on irc.
Permalink
07.08.10
Posted in Camino, Life
at 1:26 am
by Smokey
To borrow a line from the illustrious Jon Hicks, “I never thought this would really happen, but…” I finally got my Camino 1.0 shirt.
Back in December of 2005, Samuel Sidler emailed those of us who had worked on Camino during the post-0.8 era, announcing that there were going to be Camino 1.0 polo shirts in celebration of our forthcoming 1.0 release. Of course Sam was out West and most of the rest of us were not, so there was always the question of how we were going to get these celebratory garments; for most, the solution turned out to be the 2007 Meet-Up. I was one of the Camino team members who couldn’t make that meet-up (or the 2008 version), so, as time went on and my shirt alternately was riding around in Sam’s car or sitting in his apartment awaiting a trip to the post office, I slowly gave up hope of ever seeing it.
Then, in late May of this year, the 2010 Samuel Sidler World Tour™ rolled into town and Sam and I met for dinner—and he had stopped by wherever lost Camino 1.0 shirts were kept and picked up mine before arriving. I never thought the day would actually come…. After such a long saga, it was a surprisingly low-key ending, yet well-worth the wait.
And, because no good story is complete without pictures, here’s Sam in his Songbird kit and me in the long-awaited Camino 1.0 polo, befuddling other patrons outside the restaurant after dinner:
Permalink
06.12.10
Posted in Links, Travel
at 1:35 am
by Smokey
I’m in a bit of a posting malaise right now, with lots I want to write about but little energy to make it happen when I have the time.
As a step in the right direction, though, I offer these links to some nifty graphics to keep your mind sharp for the weekend:
- Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench from Our Amazing Planet
- I never realized the Statue of Liberty was so short!
- Locals and Tourists from Eric Fischer
- Having been a tourist in nearly a dozen of these places, a former resident of one,1 and a general geography buff, it’s fascinating to see the places we find interesting, and the differences around the world (Greater Cairo, for instance, has a relatively low density of photographs, and an even-lower density of definable locals—but it is fun to see the tourists on felucca rides in the Nile!).
1 Or two, by the definition used in the compilation—had I uploaded any photos to Flickr, of course. ↩
Permalink
05.31.10
Posted in History, Life
at 8:36 pm
by Smokey
In the 1940s, all four of the children of John and Mary Ardisson of Export, Pennsylvania, answered the call of their country and served overseas in branches of the United States Army. All four were lucky enough to return home safely. Since the last Memorial Day, two of them have left us.
Dorothy Anna Ardisson, 1917-2009
Second Lieutenant, US Army Nurse Corps, World War II (March 1942-October 1945); service at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, and Oran, Algeria
Gerald John Ardisson, 1921-2009
Second Lieutenant, US Army Air Forces, World War II (March 1943-October 1945); service in the skies over France and Germany from Nottingham, England
Permalink
05.28.10
Posted in Camino
at 2:04 am
by Smokey
As I alluded to recently, we’ve been very close to shipping usable nightly builds of Camino 2.1a1pre running on top of Gecko 1.9.2. The last bug blocking these builds, a change in Gecko 1.9.2 that triggered regular crashes, was fixed on Wednesday.
As a result, as of Thursday morning, we have Camino 2.1a1pre nightlies we’re not afraid to recommend all nightly testers. We’ve updated the nightly download link on caminobrowser.org, and I’ve pushed Thursday’s nightly to users of the experimental builds via software update. There are still a number of regressions present in 1.9.2-based 2.1a1pre builds (mostly caused by Gecko changes), so for the moment we’re continuing to produce 1.9-based 2.1a1pre nightlies, but we hope to turn them off in the not-too-distant future.
Once again, special thanks go to Christopher Henderson, whose intrepid hacking was responsible for most of the key breakthroughs that have gotten us to this point. Because of his work and that of the rest of the Camino team, 𝌙 is something tangible, something that Camino fans can use on a daily basis, and something that is a large improvement on Camino 2.1
We still have much work ahead of us, but we’re all excited that everyone can now experience the fruits of our recent months’ labours. Please take the new nightlies for a spin, and, as the “nightly build” text on caminobrowser.org admonishes, “Please report any bugs you find while you browse. Isn’t life on the bleeding edge great?!”
1 For those of you on non-Mac platforms who are reading this post directly on افكار و احلام (rather than on a planet or in a feed reader), you’re likely able to see 𝌙2 thanks to some @font-face work by the always-resourceful Philippe Wittenbergh and the fine folks responsible for the DejaVu Sans font. ↩
2 Writing this post led me to discover a fun WordPress bug, as WordPress seems to truncate fields when encountering a “raw UTF-8” 𝌙 glyph (or perhaps any SMP glyph). ↩
Permalink
05.24.10
Posted in Camino
at 10:06 pm
by Smokey
Ouf, has it really been nearly two months since the last update? 
Since the last Camino update, though, we’ve been hard at work on various projects.
- On the releases front, we’ve readied the Camino 2.0.3 release; at this point, we’re only waiting on the multilingual build.
- Stuart Morgan continued to handle most of the super-review requests, and he also fixed a number of bugs during this period. He fixed a follow-up issue with the new Spotlight importer, eliminated a situation where clearing history or resetting Camino failed to clear the “Recently Closed Pages” menu, and updated our Sparkle usage to current code (minus the changes that make the current Sparkle fail to work on Mac OS X 10.4). Stuart also wrote patches to remove usage of a pair of deprecated functions and to prevent possible exceptions with some autocomplete searches.
- At the time of the last update, there were still a few of Christopher Henderson’s initial set of build-with-1.9.2 patches waiting for super-review; those have since landed. In addition, he wrote a quick patch that eliminated the most common cause of “magically reappearing autocomplete window,” much to the relief of nightly build users. Finally, about a week ago, Christopher came up with a magnificent 1-liner to fix the vexing xpconnect/component registration problem, allowing us to have the tinderboxen produce nightly builds without failing during startup tests.
- Since the last update, Philippe Wittenbergh finished the “follow-up” work he had undertaken on our 2008-2009 icon update, fixing the issues that we had raised with several of those icons. He also continued to help with triage, testing, and upcoming ad-blocking changes.
- After a couple of review cycles, Cocoa widget hacker Markus Stange’s patch to fix how we saved and loaded print settings landed earlier today.
- In the past few weeks, I’ve focused on general-purpose extermination and patch shepherding, fixing a number of smaller bugs and helping get other patches landed in the tree. I’ve also worked on a couple of patches to make Gecko’s various “sourcestamp” display functions more useful to all of the projects that build from more than one repository, and I made the aforementioned anchor-preservation fix to MXR’s blame links. When not working on those items or the 2.0.3 release, I also continued to do infrastructure work related to bootstrapping our new Mercurial repository and 1.9.2-based nightly builds, and I produced experimental builds on roughly a fortnightly basis.
A week ago Sunday, thanks to hendy’s path-normalization patch and some last-minute fixes for my own errors, cb-xserve04 produced the first nightly build of Camino 2.1a1pre with Gecko 1.9.2. Although we’ve been building these nightlies successfully for a week, they are not yet usable; we still need the patch for bug 533001 to land in the mozilla-1.9.2 repository to prevent hourly crashes in the nightly builds. This afternoon the patch to fix bug 533001 was approved for landing, so hopefully later this week we will actually start shipping 1.9.2-based Camino 2.1a1pre nightly builds!
Permalink
04.28.10
Posted in Camino
at 9:14 pm
by Smokey
A long, long time ago, in a galaxysource code indexing tool far away, timeless wrote some code that made jumping from a given (anchored) line in MXR to bonsai’s blame view preserve the anchor (fragment identifier) on arrival in bonsai (as well as do other cool things, like set up an automatic “mark”).
With the migration to Mercurial and its web view, though, this time-saving enhancement was lost. For a long time, I was annoyed by this regression and lamented having to manually edit URLs or scroll multiple-thousand line files when leaving MXR for Mercurial’s annotated source (“blame”) view. However, I recently discovered timeless’s original changes and ported them to MXR’s “HG Blame” link. Server Ops deployed the fix last night, so it’s once again possible to end up on the same line in blame view as you were on in the un-annotated source.
Please enjoy! (and volunteer to port bonsai’s awesome “mark” abilities to Mercurial’s web view?)
Permalink
04.06.10
Posted in Camino
at 10:57 pm
by Smokey
As a reminder for everyone considering applying to the 2010 Google Summer of Code to work on a project related to Camino, the deadline for student applications is this Friday (April 9th at 19:00 UTC).
As mentioned previously on the Camino Blog, we have a list of project suggestions on our wiki. Please stop by the #camino channel on irc.mozilla.org and let us know what project you’re interested in tackling, and good luck with your applications!
Permalink
04.05.10
Posted in Camino
at 1:32 am
by Smokey
It’s been a while since the last regular Camino update (there hasn’t been a traditional one at all this year!), though I’ve continued to post ad hoc updates as warranted. We had a productive month of March, though, so I wanted to make sure that I got a more comprehensive post out.
- On the releases front, in the middle of the month we released Camino 1.6.11, the sunset release for Camino 1.6.x and Mac OS X 10.3 support. 1.6.11 picks up a number of fixes for long-standing bugs that we fixed in Camino 2.0.x and also includes one last round of Gecko security updates. While we hope our 10.3 users will be upgrading their OS or getting a new Mac soon, this is a solid release to tide them over until they have systems capable of running Camino 2.
- Mike Pinkerton and Stuart Morgan kept our super-review queues flowing despite the large number of patches arriving in the queues. In addition to reviewing duties, Stuart also wrote a new Spotlight importer to support indexing Camino bookmarks (since Apple changed the OS importer to always open results in Safari, instead of the default browser) and also worked up a project patch to fix the way we referred to Sparkle in the linking build step.
- Christopher Henderson was a veritable patch-producing machine this month. His big patch switched our history back-end from Mork to Places, 10 of his other patches landed in one or more of our repositories last month, and he has another two still awaiting super-review. In addition, he took over from Chris Lawson on the patch to fix the way our UI to add items to the Flashblock exceptions list validates input and conducted extensive research to formulate a plan of attack.
- Philippe Wittenbergh was busy last month pushing pixels. Camino 2.1a1pre builds include three updated preference pane icons and two updated downloads window toolbar icons, and Philippe is working on updating an additional three icons in the main toolbar and one in the downloads window toolbar. He also produced a set of patches to make about:plugins finally have a sane appearance and did some additional CSS work on the website.
- Cocoa Widget hacker Markus Stange investigated a print settings bug reported in our experimental builds and has a patch up for super-review to fix an apparently long-standing bug with the way we saved print settings.
- I spent most of March working on things related to our Gecko 1.9.2 project (with a little bit of release work and Summer of Code marketing here and there). After dozens and dozens of wasted hours, I finally persuaded Mercurial to generate a usable import of our CVS code and then merged the patches from our test repository (based off one of the early unworkable Mercurial imports) into a new repository. After my assorted build-related patches were in the test repository, I also spent a good deal of time working on automation, only to ultimately be stalemated by an inexplicable xpconnect/component registration problem that prevent tests from working and thus automated builds from being produced. I also investigated changes necessary to get symbol generation to work in Gecko 1.9.2, wrote a first draft of new Gecko 1.9.2-based build instructions, and generated two new experimental builds in March to help testers get access to the latest fixes and changes. Finally, I also changed the way our HTML bookmarks importer handles Firefox 3.x profiles in order to prevent the import of unwanted old or default
bookmarks.html files.
All in all, March was a busy month. Right now our experimental Gecko 1.9.2-based builds contain only a few local patches (a pair for the downloads folder preferences and the print settings patch) and a few patches against Gecko (most notably the fix for Cocoa Widget bug 533001, which prevents random hourly crashing; it’s mostly a waiting game now for the patch to land on the trunk and then get 1.9.2 branch approval). Hopefully before the end of April the Cocoa Widget patch will be approved for branch landing, we’ll have figured out the nasty xpconnect/component registration issue, and we will then be producing official nightly builds on a daily basis (until then, I will continue trying to produce new experimental builds on a regular basis).
Permalink
04.03.10
Posted in Life
at 1:28 am
by Smokey
Things I learned today:
- I have less hair on my head than I thought.
- It can take longer to check out with three pies and two gallons of milk in the express line than it takes to get a haircut.
- No matter how hard one tries to move pieces of tree trunks without hurting one’s back, one can still hurt said back.
- Whatever that thing is that periodically happens to my foot (and which happened this morning while walking the dogs), it doesn’t go away as quickly as usual when one spends the afternoon walking around running errands and doing yardwork.
- I am not as young as I used to be.
- Sometimes when one dreams a solution to a problem, it is actually a solution to the problem.
- Writing short posts can sometimes be as hard as writing long ones, particularly when you can’t remember everything you intended to write once you sit down to write (see also: item five).
- After a several-year outage, beccary.com is back, with a new version of Ocadia. New item on the to-do list: merge local changes. FileMerge, here I come?
Permalink
