11.30.08
Posted in Camino at 11:04 pm by Smokey
In spite of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, we still managed a fairly active week.
- Stuart Morgan landed his patch to add Tab Overview as an optional toolbar button, worked on security UI patches, and, as always, performed reviews.
- Sean Murphy’s tab dragging patch landed early in the week amid much fanfare, and he began work on some of the follow-up bugs.
- Christopher Henderson’s revivification of Håkan Waara’s work to enable middle-click support for the Bookmark Bar also landed this week. Christopher also continued work on our site icon sizing issues during the week.
- Ilya Sherman experienced his first Camino meeting this week, and we hammered out some more details related to his Growl-for-downloads patch during said meeting.
- Jeff Dlouhy spent his Camino time this week working on more polish for Tab Overview (as well as delivering an angry review on one of Christopher’s patches).
- Chris Lawson spun a new version of his patch to better handle Address Book cards for companies. He was also involved in our effort to track down the nasty PPC Gecko crash.
- In addition to landing Sean’s and Christopher’s exciting patches, I kept busy this week working on the PPC crash regression in Gecko 1.9.0 that I mentioned earlier in the week. Working together with Samuel Sidler, NSPR developer Wan-Teh Chang, Chris Lawson, and a handful of other Camino users, we discovered the cause of the crash and Dan Veditz checked in an interim fix. This means Camino users on PPC Macs will no longer experience “random” crashes whenever JavaScript is used (and Firefox users on PPC will no longer experience inescapable crashes on startup) in Gecko 1.9.0 (Camino 2.0b1pre/Firefox 3.0.5pre) nightly builds!
Now that the PPC crash is out of the way and tab dragging has landed, we’ll start thinking about Camino 2.0 Beta 1 in the coming weeks.
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11.25.08
Posted in Camino at 2:13 pm by Smokey
It occurred to me this morning that many of you may be eager to upgrade to the latest nightlies in order to try out all of the new features we’ve been landing in Camino.
Unfortunately, there are also a couple of known crashers in Gecko 1.9.0 that are currently unfixed which will disproportionately affect Camino users and may adversely impact your experience when trying nightlies with these new features. Unless you’re running Mac OS X 10.5 on an Intel Mac, you may want to wait a bit longer before trying one of these nightly builds.
- Beginning with the November 15 nightly, there is a crash related to JavaScript that affects PPC Macs. This crash may appear “random” to you, on startup or during pageload, but from all accounts it affects a wide variety of websites. This crash is still under heavy investigation.
- There is a crash related to drawing form buttons on web pages that affects users of Mac OS X 10.4. This crash also appears to strike at random, as not every page with form buttons will trigger the crash. Using the Tab Overview feature may trigger this crash more often than simply visiting web pages. This crash probably affects all Camino 2.0a1pre and Camino 2.0b1pre versions, as well as Camino 2.0a1. The good news on this crash is that there is a probable patch that is currently “baking” on Gecko 1.9.1, so if the patch proves itself there, it should be checked in on Gecko 1.9.0 for Camino 2 nightlies.
We apologize to all of you eager to try our new features who are instead experiencing these crashes (particularly those of you on Mac OS X 10.4 on PPC Macs who are currently doubly cursed) and hope you will bear with us as we work with Gecko developers to get these crashes fixed for future Camino nightlies.
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11.24.08
Posted in Camino at 9:14 pm by Smokey
For several months now, I’ve been alluding to Sean Murphy’s latest big project. I’ve been reluctant to mention the project in more detail because every time I’ve gotten excited about this particular feature in the past, the patch has been derailed, either by other commitments on the part of the author or by release deadlines and reluctant minusing (and also because Sean’s first big feature for Camino 2 was stillborn due to licensing issues), and I didn’t want to jinx this effort. Today I’m extremely pleased to reveal that I have just landed Sean’s patch to enable tab dragging; tomorrow’s (23 November) Camino 2.0b1pre nightly will contain the feature.
As you’ll doubtless notice, tab dragging is not yet perfect; we have a number of follow-up bugs filed already to polish the implementation and fill in the gaps. Due to limitations in Gecko 1.9.0, it’s unlikely that Camino 2 will support dragging tabs out of one window to create a new one, but most of the other limitations should be addressable, within the limitations of volunteer time.
Tab dragging has been the most-voted bug in Camino for some time and was one of our oldest open bugs (filed by sairuh in August of 2002!), so it’s been a long time coming. Desmond Elliott wrote the first testable implementation back in the summer of 2006 (when he also wrote the scrolling tab bar), four years after the bug was filed. Jeff Dlouhy picked up the baton in October of 2007, producing a few testable implementations (and two different approaches, code-wise) by February 2008, when it was clear dragging couldn’t make Camino 1.6 deadlines. Stuart Morgan, Håkan Waara, and Sean himself served as reviewers at various stages in the process, and many of us opened our mouths with design ideas. Thanks to everyone involved in making tab dragging a reality, and especially to Sean for all the hard work to see the feature through to fruition! 
(It’s been a busy day on the cvs server, as we’ve also landed other goodies such as middle-click support in the Bookmark Bar from Christopher Henderson, the toolbar icon for Tab Overview, with code from Stuart and the icon by Philippe Wittenbergh, and a handful of smaller patches.)
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Posted in Camino at 2:08 am by Smokey
Hat trick?
- In case you missed it, we released Camino 1.6.5 during the week, with the usual tag-team effort. We also tested our bread truck preparedness and came out winners (though it’s still not OK for a bread truck to take out any of us).
- Stuart Morgan was busy this week, tracking down a couple of potential sources of leaks and exceptions. He also went two rounds of review with Sean Murphy’s latest feature, wrote the code to enable the toolbar icon for Tab Overview, and tidied up the code to disable various toolbar buttons when Tab Overview has been invoked. In addition, Stuart tackled several large reviews and worked on incremental improvements to our security UI again this week, including writing a quick patch Sunday that makes importing a personal certificate far less confusing. By the end of the weekend, through his reviews and his patches, Stuart managed to stuff pinkerton’s sr queue more full than a turkey on Thursday.
- Sean Murphy posted two new versions of the patch for his current special project, finally winning Stuart’s r+ on the latest version.
- Christopher Henderson was part of the all-Kiwi team on #camino that tracked down a regression that broke Flashblock within 24 hours of the breakage. He also won the coveted pinkerton “Ship it!” on his proposal to fix the poorly-scaled site icons on tabs.
- Chris Lawson spent time investigating Christopher Henderson’s patch to fix our display of the BBC site icon, and after securing a number of bizarre
.ico files from me for testing, reviewed the patch.
- Ilya Sherman continued poking the murky depths of our download code, and he posted a new cleanup patch after Nick Kreeger’s review of the first version.
- Philippe Wittenbergh posted another pair of iterations on the Tab Overview icon and won our approval; Stuart landed the new icon on Sunday.
- Samuel Sidler helped investigate a pageload regression we noticed last weekend, ably performing a local backout on boxset to confirm the cause of the regression.
- Besides my work on the Camino 1.6.5 release, my major accomplishment was landing my patch that exposes the first half of our Gecko strings to localization. It’s not perfect (a number of Gecko string bundles seem inexplicably to ignore the string override service), and far from complete, but it’s a big step forward for our localization teams. I also jumped in after Christopher Henderson’s investigation of the Flashblock regression and prepared a patch to upgrade our copy of Flashblock and fix the regression.
It certainly felt like a busy (and productive week), but I am looking forward to the Thanksgiving holidays this week for a bit of downtime (or at least some more pie)!
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11.17.08
Posted in Camino at 12:06 am by Smokey
Look, two weeks in a row!
- Mark Mentovai put back on the build engineer’s cap and built the Camino 1.6.5 release candidate last week.
- Stuart Morgan again kept his eye on the review queue, handing out both r- and r+ during the week. In addition, he developed a fix that tweaks the Quarantine code.
- Newcomer Ilya Sherman found himself knee-deep in our download code this past week while working to update the old Growl downloads patch.
- Philippe Wittenbergh spent time creating a toolbar icon for the Tab Overview feature and produced a number of versions based on early feedback.
- Christopher Henderson’s focus on the location bar continued, with a brief diversion into the land of the bookmark bar. Early in the week, I landed his patch to bring our location bar into the twenty-first century by displaying non-ASCII characters in URLs in their full unescaped UTF-8 glory. Christopher’s patch to enable middle-click in the bookmark bar is now awaiting super-review, and he has patches awaiting review that choose the most appropriately-sized site icon for display and that provide a keyboard shortcut to open search field menus.
- Marcello Testi, our hardworking caminol10n coordinator, built the Camino 1.6.5 Multilingual disk image last week, and he also posted about his experiences starting to update the Italian translation for Camino 2.
- Early last week I made a pass over our 2.0-targeted bug list, re-triaging a few of the bugs. I also continued working on the patch to allow localization of Gecko strings, producing a second version this weekend. I also prepared the website for the 1.6.5 release, wrote an AppleScript to automate updating the update description files, and spent some time improving our development documentation on the wiki, thanks in part to questions from Ilya.
Next up, Camino 1.6.5.
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11.10.08
Posted in Camino at 10:48 pm by Smokey
You may have noticed a decrease in the number of Camino updates coming from this source over the past, uh, couple of months. Alas, I have found myself quite busy with the rest of life (or with things like releasing Camino when less busy), so if you’ve assumed nothing has been happening in the world of Camino development, I’m back for the moment to inform you that you’re sadly mistaken. 
- Since the last regular weekly update, we’ve released Camino 1.6.4 (which added Catalan to the list of localizations) and shipped the first early preview of Camino 2. We’ve also been hard at work getting fixes ready for Camino 1.6.5, the next security and stability release on the agenda.
- Stuart Morgan landed the “Recently Closed Tabs” sub-menu before 2.0a1, worked on a fix for a case of buggy dragging in the bookmarks manager, and has been performing a large share of review and super-review work in recent months. He’s also chased down bugs and regressions in interactions with Gecko and has helped with work on some of the Mac Gecko topcrashers, including the crash that makes users of Mac OS X 10.4 weep.
- Sean Murphy has been hard at work on a feature I very much would like to write about, but I haven’t had very good luck reporting early on features that haven’t landed
, and I really don’t want to “jinx” this one. In addition to his work on the unnamed feature, Sean has fixed several follow-up issues from the keyboard loop landing, revised his patch to fix font name issues in the Fonts preferences, and reviewed several other patches.
- While dodging buses and surviving mid-terms, Jeff Dlouhy has been dusting off some of his old patches to bring further polish to the new Tab Overview (née Tabsposé) feature.
- Christopher Henderson has continued attacking any and all bugs relating to the location bar. In the past week he’s been working on site icon sizing and blurriness issues. His “use UTF-8 display for URLs everywhere” patch is waiting for superreview, and he has a patch up for review that fixes an edge-case issue with displaying the autocomplete window. Christopher has also picked up Håkan Waara’s work on supporting middle-click in the Bookmark Bar and is shepherding it through the review process again, and he is implementing our “down arrow to show autocomplete” heuristic in search fields in order to provide a keyboard shortcut for showing search field menus. (In the middle of all this, Christopher also had a fortnight of vacation where IP-over-ovine-transport provided the best available connectivity.)
- Chris Lawson has worked on bugs in a number of areas, including adding more sanity to the code that syncs preferences states when opening or changing preference panes, to our feed-handling, and to our special collections code. He has also made fixes to our Dock menu code and is working on some polish for selections and searches in the bookmarks manager. The other half of our “dynamic Chris duo” has also been coordinating with Bryan Atwood on the long-delayed whitelist for Flashblock.
- In addition to my usual QA and triage work, most of my efforts over the last couple of months have been focused on our releases, though I did go through a spell where I finished a number of long-suffering tasks related to our website content. I’ve also helped dig in to a handful of “interesting” Gecko bugs that have crossed my plate, and I snuck in one of my trademark “wow, I can’t believe I can fix this with two lines of Cocoa!” fixes for a bug that proved a constant annoyance in my work. Recently I’ve spent time working to make some of the Gecko strings accessible to our localizers for Camino 2, which brings us a step closer to being able to ship a fully-localized application.
I know I’ve left out a number of things here and there, but that list captures a good chunk of the work from the last month and a half. We’ve also had some visits from long-time friends and former developers we hadn’t seen in a while, and that always brings positive energy to the team. On the horizon are Camino 1.6.5 and Camino 2.0b1, the former soon and the latter after a bit, and hopefully soon I’ll be able to write about landing the latest round of Sean’s hard work instead of tip-toeing around it.
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11.04.08
Posted in Life at 2:52 am by Smokey
…particularly incumbents:
When you don’t respond to the League of Women Voters voting guide questions, you are sending the message that you don’t take the election—and the job of serving your constituents—seriously, and you aren’t showing us respect. As a result, you won’t be receiving my vote.
This is particularly true if you have been in office since I was in high school.1
1 By now you should at least be able to find canned responses to most of the questions. ↩
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