01.09.11

Camino 2010 in Review

Posted in Camino, Life at 3:49 am by Smokey

For me, 2010 was an exhausting year, and that definitely bled through into my Camino involvement; I had less time to write, so there were fewer and more irregular status updates—and, while Camino Planet was malfunctioning, none at all—fewer forum posts, fewer bug cleanups, and generally less of a public face. As a result of the year, I ended up taking a fairly long hiatus for the holidays, and I’m trying not to jump back into things at full speed.

For Camino, 2010 was an interesting year, a year of many transitions. We had more changes in our teams than in past years, as Sam headed off to travel the world (and most of his responsibilities fell to others) and as successful careers took off for other contributors. Although 2010 was the first year since I began these years-in-review that we did not ship a major new version, we made many significant changes in the hectic first half of the year that laid the foundation for bigger and better things to come.

1. We shipped five security and stability updates to Camino 2 during the year, including fixing several long-standing bugs; our localization teams continued to supply release notes and update descriptions for these updates in all 15 languages. We also released Camino 1.6.11, one final security and stability update for our Mac OS X 10.3.9 users.
2. Camino 2 was a finalist for Best Independent Browser and Best Mac Browser in the 2010 About.com Reader’s Choice Awards (in the former category, Camino was the only browser nominated that didn’t run on Windows, and we finished second in the voting).
3. Camino built across six different branches in the course of the year, from Gecko 1.8.1 (Camino 1.6.x) all the way to the latest, Gecko 1.9.3.
   • In February, Christopher Henderson got Camino building on Gecko 1.9.1 (with some help from me, and from some earlier efforts by Philippe Wittenbergh and Kai Rune Mathisen to build newer Gecko versions).
   • The very next week in February, Christopher got Camino building and running more-or-less as expected on Gecko 1.9.2, and I started producing the first of many experimental builds while we fixed lingering issues and worked on building “out-of-the-box” with that version of Gecko, a process that lasted until late May.
   • Following up on the work to get Camino working on Gecko 1.9.2, in early June Stuart Morgan almost single-handedly got Camino building against mozilla-central (Gecko 1.9.3), before we were slammed into a brick wall of embedding-unfriendly code and massive Gecko platform changes that were taken after the platform had reached the beta stage! (Because of those issues and the focus by Mozilla platform developers on bugs related to Firefox 4, we put the mozilla-central experiment on hold and concentrated our efforts on the places that would bring the most benefit for our users.)
4. Christopher also wrote a very significant patch that moved Camino from the old, creaky Mork history to the newer SQLite-based history backend; combined with 2009’s autocomplete rewrite and the move to Gecko 1.9.2, Camino finally became free of the trinity of Bad Old Mozilla Technologies (Mork, RDF, and XPFE).
5. Camino development moved from CVS to Mercurial, and our volunteer development team adapted to the many changes brought by the new system. (Stuart learned his 1001^st different version control system in service of Camino, and I learned about the wretched, buggy state of Mercurial’s CVS import tools, spending the better part of a month trying to coax a workable import out of that software.) In addition, I put together build automation for our new Gecko 1.9.2-based repository and nightlies.
6. After getting nightlies based on Gecko 1.9.2, most of our attention during the year was on the lingering issues with the new (slower) history and autocomplete implementations, and to a lesser extent on focus regressions from the Gecko focus rewrite. This was an area where the strains and limitations of an all-volunteer project became evident in 2010, as many of us spent about half the year living with a slow location bar. Dan Weber started working on fixes early in the year, but he was pulled away by school and other things; Stuart picked up the work and, as time permitted, slowly iterated through what became a significant rewrite of both the autocomplete code and parts of the history user interface code. (The thoroughly-rewritten code, which landed in the first week of 2011, works very well, and everyone will see it in an alpha very soon.)
7. Our “fun with tinderboxen” in 2010 was not nearly as traumatic as in past years. Although both of our 10.4 tinderboxen—our original Xserve, cb-xserve01, and our last PowerPC tinderbox, cb-minibinus01—went down for a several weeks during the year, both were resurrected successfully (although cb-minibinus01 came back running Mac OS X 10.5, which was not ideal, but better than losing our last PPC box entirely). In addition, at the beginning of the year, we brought a brand-new Xserve, cb-xserve04, online, which gives us some headroom for the future (in addition to producing our Camino 2.1 development nightly builds). While Sam did most of the work of setting up cb-xserve04, I handled the setup of the other two when they returned to us, leaving me fully versed in tinderbox setup.
8. While Camino websites have been trouble-free for quite some time, Camino Planet did suffer an outage where it failed to update due to errors after a bizarre SSH outage on our server. Our major website project in the second half of the year involved moving to a newer, better-configured server (as our host was decommissioning our current one); Sam did most of the work on that project, and afterwards we were able to deploy a number of website changes that we had wanted to be able to do for some time. The other significant event in the website department was the introduction of Flash version checking (a joint effort from Stuart, Philippe, Sam, and me) on the welcome page shown after installing or upgrading Camino; the notifications have made a noticeable difference in ensuring Camino users are updating Flash to get that plug-in’s latest security and stability fixes.
9. The composition of our development team was in flux again this year, reflecting the nature of a volunteer project. Many of those who carried Camino through 2009 and the Camino 2 release moved on to new jobs or lucrative careers as indie Mac/iOS developers, while others had to cut back commitments. In addition to Christopher’s and Stuart’s efforts mentioned above, highlights of our developer cadre included the following:
   • Towards the end of 2010, Chris Peterson showed up and began fixing assorted bugs, mostly in the Downloads window and in our menu code (though he has additional patches in flight touching scarier stuff, like focus!).
   • Sean Murphy (who contributed significant features to Camino 2) made a brief reappearance to update our gesture support for Gecko changes, and Ilya Sherman performed his first code reviews. Philippe Wittenbergh continued to keep us looking good with website fixes, new icons and images, updated CSS, and he even ventured into the realm of small code and Makefile fixes.
   • Although Sam insisted that I be listed on the Programming team beginning with the Camino 1.6 release, I had never really felt like a “developer” previously (in addition to ad-blocking, I mostly touched project file changes and, after some tutelage by mento, various build system-related fixes). However, in 2010 I finally started producing fixes to our Cocoa/Objective-C code on a somewhat-regular basis; I learned a little more about debugging and began investigating and, where I could, fixing things that annoyed me! I also ended up fixing several bugs in Gecko that blocked our 1.9.2-based builds or were regressions, and I worked on extending a number of changeset-related Gecko build system features to work in cases where an application is built using code from multiple repositories (as is true for every Gecko-using application other than Firefox). So, in 2010 I learned (and forgot!) a good bit of Objective-C/Cocoa (and some Perl), and I finally felt like I could play a developer on TV. While I’ll never be able to have a large impact like writing new features or performing significant code surgery and refactoring as our Cocoa stalwarts do, I can still help by fixing some small things, in between my other responsibilities in build and release, website and documentation, and bug-minding. As we often say, every additional developer counts.

So there’s a belated look at the many highlights (and some “lowlights”) of Camino in 2010. Although sometimes it seems like less happened in 2010 than in years past, looking back on the year reveals many large changes; they were just sometimes slow to develop and often were not exciting, user-facing changes. Nevertheless, we find ourselves on the cusp of a great new Camino 2.1 Alpha as the new year opens!

Finally, I want to take a moment to extend thanks again to the entire Camino community: our developers, our testers, our localizers, our users—the folks posting in the forum, writing AppleScripts, and filing bugs; those who take time to blog, tweet, and make videos about Camino; and especially those who help out with user support and bug triage—and our friends. All of you make this great little browser possible, and we’re grateful for your contributions, your continued support, and your love for Camino. Here’s to a great 2011!

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