02.08.10
Standing on the shoulders of Kiwis
It has been some time since the last regular Camino development status update, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work—it just means that I’ve been pretty busy with all sorts of things, and the status updates have been fairly low on my to-do list.
As I said, though, we’ve been working on all sorts of things so far this year. Dan Weber has been hard at work on patches for some of the most visible issues with the new autocomplete experience, and I landed the fix for the magically-reappearing autocomplete window tonight. Dan is also still working on improving the speed of autocomplete for large histories, though that patch is not yet ready. Chris Lawson has also been working on various and sundry other bugs, including changes to the Flashblock exceptions list so that pasting URLs into the field will work as users expect. Philippe Wittenbergh is hard at work polishing some of our toolbar icons.
Christopher Henderson has been working on a patch that moves our history off of Mork, which is both the sane thing to do and critical for moving forward to the new Mork-less world. As usual, I have been chasing down bugs here and there and wrangling patches to get ready for the upcoming 2.0.2 and 1.6.11 releases. We’ve also seen Alex Jones, who has been working off-and-on on supporting Mobile Me sync, again recently, though it sounds like Sync Services wants to do things in a manner that is not easily compatible with Camino’s bookmarks implementation. All in all, we’ve been fairly productive since the new year began.
Which brings us back to the title of this post and to this weekend’s developments. Late Saturday afternoon, I got a debug version of Camino to build, launch, and run using Gecko 1.9.1, and early Sunday evening I was able to make a static (i.e., distributable) build do the same thing. (Even better, Christopher Henderson was able to replicate my success.) This feat would not have been possible without all the hard work that Christopher put in for the aforementioned history migration, as well as a good bit of debugging and patching he did this weekend as we hit some unexpected code-change-related build failures. After applying those patches, I mostly deleted and added things to the project and waited for the next build failure. At the end of the day, though, Camino launches and runs, plays <audio> and <video> (with Ogg), and displays pages with @font-face (with raw TrueType fonts).
This doesn’t mean that we can turn around and release a version of Camino based on Gecko 1.9.1 (and there’s a very strong possibility we may not); for starters, there are a number of known regressions (including the loss of Find-As-You-Type), as well as possibly hundreds of other serious problems we haven’t discovered in our limited test browsing. Beyond that, the “build system” is not yet a system at all; it involves pulling mozilla-1.9.1 from hg, checking out Camino from cvs into mozilla/camino, and applying a large patch. But if you’re brave or crazy, you can try this at home now (and for those less brave or more sane, there’s an Intel-only build here that you can use to help us find other broken things. N.B. You should treat this build as highly experimental. It might eat all of the cheese in your house. It will eat your profile, so make a backup copy first).
(Update 9 Feb: The patch above now has all of the required parts of the history migration, which had been missing from the earlier patch.)
We also know (thanks to earlier attempts by Philippe Wittenbergh and Kai Rune Mathisen to build mozilla-central) that there are more serious code breakages in newer versions of Gecko, so this is only the beginning. In between other things the last few weeks, I’ve also been working on a new repository and fleshing out issues and solutions for the build system. There’s a long road ahead, and Camino 2.1 might be ready before we’ve gotten to the end of the road; we’ll have to see. However, as Christopher said on Saturday night, “it’s been a great day in Camino Land.”
February 8, 2010 at 7:00 am
That’s indeed a great day for Camino. Congratulations!
The build you made available runs great so far. Even FlashBlock… Typing in the location bar shows other items in the History part than what I saw before but that is note really an issue.
Tomorrow I’ll proceed with the little dance with Hg and friends.
February 8, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Yes, even Flashblock works—that turned out to be an entirely trivial fix; I just wasn’t thinking about how to do it when you and Kai were building, only that it would need doing. (Similarly, fixing all of our custom CSS and whatnot will be fairly easy; it will just be plodding through the file moves and so forth.)
The wiki page is now heavily out-of-date in some places, since I didn’t want to cross something out until the fix was committed somewhere and I don’t have a (working, updated) repository for 1.9.1 work yet.
February 8, 2010 at 3:23 pm
OH MY GOD !!!!! 1.9.1 burns !!!!! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH !!!!!!! I can not belive it… it’s a dream… somebody hit me please !!! WOW !!!!
@Smokey: Scrolling is sooooo smooth with the trackpad now… very, very nice !!!!!!
@philippe: I will dance, too
February 8, 2010 at 4:30 pm
…that you can use to help us find other broken things…
1.) a good old bug is back: Delete no longer functions as a keyboard shortcut for Back
–> but this is fixed with 1.9.1: Scroll bars will appear active at all times <–
February 9, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Mehmet: thanks for the reminder about Delete; the fix for that depends on a Core patch that only landed on 1.9.0, and I’ve added it to my list of “missing patches”. Glad you’re enjoying the build.
Another problem that philippe has discovered is that history isn’t getting saved on quit, so there’s more work to do—but also more exciting things ahead.
February 9, 2010 at 1:11 pm
@Smokey: I don’t know, if you are (at the moment) interested in Crash-Reports with your 1.9.1-build?
I have crashes (not always), when I quit (CMD+Q) Camino on my 10.5.8-Mac.
Here is the link to the Report: http://www.file-upload.net/download-2242931/Camino_2010-02-09-190445_memos-macbook.txt.html
Regards
Mehmet
February 9, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Mehmet: Thanks for the crash report. It’s too early for us to do much with most crashes, but if you do see crashes that happen a lot (like I assume that one does), please do let us know, since they point to more significant underlying problems we might be facing.
February 9, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Great day in Camino land indeed!
Really pleased to see sucg progress, all the way to a built and running version. Thanks Smokey, Christopher, and others.
I totally understand that these are the first initial steps, and that there is a long way to go before we have taken on latest Gecko in a stable stage. If ever, as Smokey stated above.
The build above is downloaded and currently running. Will give it a test, then look into setting up my own tree.
Best regards from Norway!
Kai
February 10, 2010 at 6:31 pm
@Smokey: concerning to the 1.9.1-build: It is not possible to change and save the values in “about:config”. And the window is no more a small one, which fades in to change the value – it is very “big” one which pops up
February 10, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Mehmet, it is only some entries in about:config that open a giant editing sheet – and changes are not applied. Others work fine.
February 11, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Hello Philippe,
oh yes, that’s right… but I noticed, that only changes are allowed when the type is “boolean” or “string”.
Changes are NOT allowed, when the type is a “integer” (And in these cases the giant editing sheet comes up)
Regards
Mehmet
February 12, 2010 at 6:20 pm
The integer craziness in about:config is due to bug 383009, which replaced an embedding-friendly implementation with one that is completely incompatible with embedding.
February 16, 2010 at 1:24 am
[...] Monday, shortly after Christopher Henderson and I had produced working Gecko 1.9.1-based builds, he posted the first screenshots of a 1.9.2-based Camino. Over the following week, Christopher has [...]