04.05.10

Camino 2010 March Roundup

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).

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