status: week ending 10/23/2007

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date and not representative. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I got a Mozilla Bugzilla account and commented on the bugs that Alex Faaborg created to track changes we want to make for Firefox 3.0. We've got a couple of months to do the changes, but Alex said that Chris said that he'd like to see it as an extension first. I'm not sure we can do that, but I plan on looking into it.

I spent an hour finishing up the Bugzilla timeline script that I've been working on over the last month or so and made it public. You can see it at http://bugzilla.pculture.org/timeline.cgi.

I spent a day or so pushing out rc0 and honing our ReleaseProcess documentation. I also did a pass through our bugs for low hanging fruit that we've been sitting on after looking at the LaunchPad bugs for Miro. I had problems with the Windows build machine which Matt helped me through.

Then I wrote some blog entries about our Gutsy situation so that users and developers knew what the status was. I worked on the gutsy packaging. BDK and I had an svn issue where he did an svn cp ... (r5515) and that wiped out my changes (r5512, r5513, and r5514). We're not entirely sure what happened.

I conversed with an unhappy and frustrated user who doesn't like that we've set up Miro to conflict with sun-java6-plugin. No one thinks it's an ideal solution, but it's the best one we've got right now. After talking about it on #miro-hackers, BDK created a bug to revisit the java plugin situation for 1.0. I'm going to see if I can find anyone at Mozilla that would know whether you can embed gtkmozembed without the plugins (I think that's the right question to ask--if not, poke me). The current consensus is that there's nothing we can do, but it sure would be nice to find out that we're wrong and the magic pixie in the sky can come down and make the problem go away.

Earlier today we released 0.9.9.9-rc0 gutsy package in a new gutsy repository. It's my first packaging experience. Our README for it is really good; I made some minor updates while I was fiddling with things.

Also, I thought PodCamp was last weekend--turns out it's next weekend. That was confusing. I figured it out after traveling on the T, getting there, puzzling about why no one else was there, calling my wife to see if I was in the wrong place, sighing deeply when I found out I'm at the right physical location but the wrong chronological location, and then taking the T home. The good thing that came out of this is that I got to test my raincoat which I had just waterproofed--it works pretty well.

I spent Sunday upgrading my laptop from Feisty to Gutsy and trying to reproduce some of the gutsy bugs we've got--I haven't been able to. It's likely there are other things involved that I'm not aware of yet.

I'm going to spend some time to upgrade my desktop to Gutsy as well and then build virtual machines for Dapper, Feisty and Gutsy. So then we'll have another person who can cover Ubuntu releases and testing and such.

Updates:

10/24/2007: I forgot to talk about the Mediabar Firefox extension... I haven't touched it in at least two weeks--possibly more. It has some big issues that need to be figured out, but I've been spending time on other things. I do want to get it fixed up because it is a useful extension. I'll try to find some time for it in the next week or so.

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