11.29.11

𝌙

Posted in Camino, Life at 4:37 pm by Smokey

If you’re reading this, it means that we have (finally!) released 𝌙, another major version of Camino. Camino 2.1 is not a revolutionary change, but a solid update—in fact I tend to think of it exactly as hansstatus noted on Twitter. So while there may not be as many attention-grabbing changes as in past releases, Camino 2.1 is, as its Unicode glyph codename indicates, an advance.

The road to 2.1 has been longer—and I think harder—than any of the prior release journeys I’ve been a part of, dating back to the long-awaited 1.0. While work on 2.1 began even before 2.0 was done (Dan Weber’s Summer of Code autocomplete work was already on “the trunk” when 2.0 was released), things really got going in early 2010, when Christopher Henderson banished Mork history and nearly single-handedly got Camino building and running on both Gecko 1.9.1 and Gecko 1.9.2. Unfortunately, the devil was in the details, and we (mostly heroic hacker Stuart Morgan) spent an inordinate amount of time tracking regressions caused by Gecko changes that ignored or didn’t work properly in embedding clients like Camino.

Still, we pushed onward, joined for a time by Chris Peterson (who made a significant contribution after Christopher Henderson had to cut back his involvement), and with a brief return visit from Camino 2 feature hero Sean Murphy alongside contributions from Camino stalwarts Ilya Sherman, Chris Lawson, and Philippe Wittenbergh. In all, we fixed approximately 400 “bugs” (problems or new features) on the road to Camino 2.1, with 15 different people contributing (for the very first time, and I hope the last, I topped the list, with 195 fixes—although about 50 of those are website changes¹). Still, it was a much longer process than we had hoped or wanted, but as I noted with the previous major release, Camino 2.1 is still a major improvement over Camino 2 and a triumph for an all-volunteer, all-free-time development team in today’s world of corporate-produced browsers.

Sadly, due to increased demands on the time of our hard-working localization teams, Camino 2.1 is going to launch with a record-low number of languages—just six—though three more will be be available again in future updates. If your language is one of those missing, please stop by the caminol10n mailing list and see how you can help bring these localizations back. (Localizing doesn’t require much specialized computer/software knowledge, and the updates required for languages that previously shipped in Camino 2 are not as comprehensive as with past releases; you and a friend can bring Camino to thousands of users in your language!)

For the first time ever, I believe, both Sam and I managed to get a full night’s sleep before a major release! The website was all ready beforehand, although we have few tweaks and changes that were safe to postpone until after the release.

The road to 2.1 has been, for me, a grueling journey, as if I were sprinting a marathon and, at times, simultaneously herding cats. Between development team changes, monkeywrench bugs, and a trying spring, I am exhausted. I am, however, incredibly grateful to everyone who has contributed to this fine new release—developers, reviewers, designers and artists, localizers, testers and bug reporters, and the rag-tag “support staff” working in Bugzilla and on the forum to address problems—and to getting Camino 2.1 shipped to our users. It has been an honor and a privilege.

I may manage to take a short break that’s actually a real break and then jump back into fixing bugs for Camino 2.1.1. Beyond that, it’s still hard to say. If you have any development experience and would like to contribute those skills and your time, please join us on our development discussion list to help us chart the future of Camino.

In the meantime, however, enjoy Camino 2.1; we hope you find it familiar but better, like an old friend fresh from new experiences.

¹ At least another handful of my remaining bugs were other non-code-related changes, and by lines of code or significance of patches, though, Stuart is still going to come out ahead. ↩

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