12.10.07

Camino: 2007 Week 49

Posted in Camino, Software at 12:50 am by Smokey

Let’s see how this goes…for now, maybe I can make this a weekly feature.

This week felt pretty hectic from where I stood, sandwiched in between the release of Camino 1.5.4 (and Troubleshoot Camino 1.2.1) and the upcoming first alpha of ✈ (a.k.a. Camino 1.6).

• The “Build & Release team” (Mark Mentovai, Samuel Sidler, and I) kept busy this week, working on the final details of the Camino 1.5.4 release, preparing for the 1.6a1 release, and dealing with cantankerous tinderboxen. We shipped 1.5.4, built a release candidate for 1.6a1, brought a new tinderbox online, and tried to resurrect the tinderbox maya, who did not reboot after upgrading to 10.4.11.
• Since the build/release and tinderbox-wrangling were not keeping him busy enough(?), Mark also cranked out a handful of patches to bring us parity with Safari in terms of metadata (“where from”) and 10.5’s Quarantine alert for downloads, as well as improvements to the script that packages our disk images and a couple of other bugs he stumbled on along the way.
  

  As an aside, the great thing about a senior dev running into something that annoys him is that he’ll quickly crank out a whole bunch of quality code to fix the (often messy) problem. The rest of us, or should I say “other Camino developers,” can buckle down and turn out code when hitting an annoyance, but it’s usually a smaller problem, less code, and not produced as quickly. Watching a senior dev in this state is beholding a thing of great beauty.

• Nick Kreeger released a new version of Correo this week and has posted patches for review that modernize some crufty code in our embedding classes and implement support for window.blur.
• As usual, Stuart Morgan’s been all over the place again this week. The big news was a patch to address a few architectural flaws in our tab system, which will fix a few bugs now and provide a more sane foundation going forward. He worked in some reviews and a couple of other patches as well.
• Between end-of-the-semester and finals, Jeff Dlouhy did a review of Stuart’s tab architecture patch and went back to adapt his tab dragging code to the changes Stuart’s patch will bring.
• In addition to my activities with “Build & Release” this week and the usual triage and support, highlights(?) included a late-night trunk bustage fix, some cleanup of our branch project file, and setting up a page to keep track of Troubleshoot Camino feature requests (I can’t keep them all in my head any more). I’m probably the last person on the Camino team to watch Mike Pinkerton’s Google Tech Talk from January, but I listened to it in the course of triaging a possible bug; if you haven’t listened to it yet, it’s worth it. We’re still not doing everything right in Camino, but we are trying.

Whew! It’s a bit of work to compile and write these up—and this was a relatively slow week. That’s all for week 49 (though I’m sure I’ve forgotten something or someone). Stay tuned this week for your first chance to board our new ✈!

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