05.28.10
𝌙 – Introducing Camino 2.1a1pre nightlies with Gecko 1.9.2
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). ↩
05.28.10 at 8:29 pm
Can the Camino nightlies auto-update themselves like the official releases do?
05.28.10 at 10:42 pm
The nightlies are, in theory, capable of performing automatic updates, but they currently do not (and for the foreseeable future will not). Bug 414065 has a little bit of the discussion of why we don’t have nightly updates—though there are also other considerations, such as the way Sparkle works (checking for updates based on usage time rather than absolute elapsed time) and issues surrounding putting our key on the tinderbox(en).
I had a decent automation routine set up for enabling updates for the experimental builds, and it was still a pain, even doing so only fortnightly.
06.08.10 at 12:00 am
Hi! Just ran across a random comment by you on this post: http://curtisb.posterous.com/what-should-mozilla-look-for-in-an-automated
How are things going?
Zellyn
06.08.10 at 1:13 am
Zellyn! Random, indeed!
Things are good; how is that “famous singing timepiece” these days? More later via typical channels…