WeeklyUpdates/2008-10-13
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Meeting Details
- 1:00pm Pacific time (20:00 UTC until November 2, 2008)
- Mozilla HQ, 1st floor conference table
- +1 650 903 0800 x91 Conf# 8600 (US/International)
- +1 416 848 3114 x91 Conf# 8600 (Canada)
- +1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8600 (US Toll Free)
- http://air.mozilla.com/ to watch and listen
- join irc.mozilla.org #staffmeeting for backchannel
note: all participants are muted automatically; if you want to talk, press *1 to un-mute yourself
WeeklyUpdate Live: You can watch the weekly meetings live at Air Mozilla You can also view previous meetings from the "on-demand" button on the Air Mozilla player. Meetings will be posted for on-demand consumption shortly after the meeting conclusion.
Contents
Friends of the Tree
- Ted writes in, "I'd like to nominate Ben Hearsum for his hard work on reinventing release automation to work with Mercurial, and making the 3.1 beta 1 release happen."
- Seth joins Ted in nominating Ben. "I'd like to nominate Ben Hearsum for friends of the tree for re-spinning zh-CN by hand so the locale could participate in the FF 3.1 Beta 1 release."
Ben Hearsum, this weeks build/release hero and Fried of the Tree!!
Please send FotT nominations to asa@mozilla.org. This is a great opportunity for the community to recognize those who go above and beyond, so please tell me when you see that happening. Thanks.
Development Updates
Branch work: Firefox 2.0.0.18 / 3.0.4
- Code freeze is October 24, a week from this Friday
- Please land any approved patches
- Please work on any blocking bugs
- Reminders will be sent quite often
- Now triaging approvals with new criteria
- Intend on changing release scheduling per proposal
Gecko 1.9.1
- Cranking on Beta 2.
- Major items of interest this week:
- About to land nanojit2. Edwin Smith from Adobe is helping Graydon Hoare iron out issues so we can land their nanojit. A BIG thanks to Adobe for all their collaborative efforts here! For lots of technical details see the bug.
- Will get us closer to JIT'ing regex in the future.
- Will enable more perf wins specifically related to tracing.
- mrbkap is working on optimistic script loading
- For slow networks, this gives solid perf improvements with numbers being report as about a 19% win.
- This is very important for mobile networks which are high-latency.
- About to land nanojit2. Edwin Smith from Adobe is helping Graydon Hoare iron out issues so we can land their nanojit. A BIG thanks to Adobe for all their collaborative efforts here! For lots of technical details see the bug.
- For always interesting notes on new features and tech on platform, be sure to read the Web Tech Blog. Roc has a great post on MozAfterPaint, Boris talks about SVG External Document References which landed for the first beta.
- See freeze dates below in Firefox 3.1 section.
- Interesting queries related to Gecko 1.9.1
- 80 1.9.1 blockers.
- 1 Blocking 1.9.1 P1s
- 37 Blocking 1.9.1 P2s
- 35 Blocking 1.9.1 P3s
- 7 Blocking 1.9.1 Other priority (Need to fix the priorities here!)
- 284 wanted bugs (also up) NOTE: Work on blockers, not wanted bugs, if you can!
Firefox 3.1
- Aiming for a beta 1 release this week (tomorrow if all goes well)
TB 3
- 3.0Alpha3 to release this week
- Hard at work on Beta 1 stuff
Mobile
- Close to alpha release of Fennec this week (weekly notes)
- Great progress on WinMo
- List of work that we will start addressing for embedding
IT
Last week's maintenance:
- More Netscaler OS upgrades
- kernel upgrades
- mailman upgrades (lists.mozilla.org)
- phone system upgrades in all Mozilla offices except Beijing
- will upgrade Beijing sometime this week (will coordinate with them on an outage time)
- major changes to the way extensions in Toronto are set up
- backend changes to the way calls are delivered between all of the offices
- If anyone runs into anything strange (things that used to work that don't anymore, etc) track down justdave or file a bug in Server Ops
- New user-visible features with this upgrade, mostly around conference rooms. Will be rolling that out sometime this week after we get the new config set up.
- Final MySQL 4 -> 5 migration
Upcoming Maintenance
- mailman upgrades (mail.mozilla.org, bugzilla.org, mozilla.org)
- Zimbra upgrade
Release Engineering
- FF3.1b1 tomorrow
- Welcome Chris AtLee ("catlee" on irc)
- RelEng all in Toronto this week
QA
Firefox 3.0.x
- tested a patch for Norton 360 issue
- Updated the top crash report for 3.0.3. Contacted an extension developer which appears to be causing our #1 and #4 topcrashes. [ss]
- Completed 1.9.0.x blocking triage and half way through 1.9.0.x approval triage [ss]
Firefox 3.1
- The team is testing Beta1. Running smoke tests, BFTs, bug fix verifications, etc. Blocker found: bug 459156 - :zhCN beta 1 builds show different search plugins per OS filed. A respin of zhCN only will be made on 3 platforms. Found 10 other new bugs.
- Feature testing:
- Worker Threads - Waiting for API to be solidified before adding more tests [adam]
- Acid3 - Started to write Test plan [tomcat]
- Got review comments on border radius patch [ctalbert]
- Got Review on CSS Transforms patch, need to address those comments [ctalbert]
- Completed analysis on XHR. See test plan [ctalbert]
- Ran Private Browsing Tryserver builds [marcia]
- Added litmus test cases for location bar [stephend]
- Progressing with Global 500 TopSite Testing for leaks, assertions and crashed [tomcat]
- Litmus- Hand corrected 15 test cases. Worked with coop to fix bug 454248. That fixed 45 unclear test case!
Test Dev
- MozMill (AKA GristMill):
- Beta 2 released on Oct 8th!
- Working on functionality for inspecting and building keypress automation, debugging some event listener problems with drop downs and local event listeners interfering with the inspector. [adam]
- Landed new framework code [mikeal]
- Generated i-Bench Benchmarks for Safari, FFx 3.1, FFx 3.0.3, IE 8 B2 [tomcat]
JavaScript Testing - Triaged bugs, reducing backlog of un-reviewed bugs from over 170, to approximately 90, with 30 bugs queued for test addition. Added tests to 40 bugs.[bc]
Localization - Worked with SethB, choffman to improve our strategy for connecting with localization testers and maximize the L10n testing discussions at the EU Camp at the end of October. [marcia, tomcat, tchung, timr]
Mobile - Worked on mobile mochitests. Ran into hurdle with tests restarting device, or not launching xpcshell/fennec.
WebDev testing:
- AMO- Worked on 4.0.2, which code-freezes tonight and ships on Oct. 16.
- Verified 6 bugs
- Worked with Wil Clouser on a test plan for revising our Add to Firefox detection mechanism.
- SUMO- Verified 7 bugs. Graph Server- Verified 2 bugs
- Spread Firefox- Rewrote the Selenium BFT to accommodate the changes to the Affiliates page
Security
- No update
Marketing/PR
PR
- Mobile
- Labs
- Above the Fold up and running
Events
Europe:
- JDLL, Lyon, France, Oct 17 - 18: Tristan and the Mozilla FR community to attend.
- [http://www.opensourceworldconference.com/oswc/presenta Open Source World Conference, Malaga, Spain, Oct. 20 - 21: Tristan keynoting.
- Web 2.0 Berlin, Oct 21 - 23: John Lilly is keynoting.
- Moz Camp, Barcelona, Spain, Oct. 25 - 26
- Mozilla Labs EU Innovation Tour: Aza Raskin & Dan Mills will be in Europe from Oct 20-26 for both press meetings and labs meetups.
- Internet CEE Conference, Warsaw, Poland Oct 28: Seth Bindernagel will hold a session on the Importance of Localization in Open Source
U.S. and more:
- ICMC/USP Computer Science Week, Oct. 13, San Carlos, Brazil: Remote presentation for students at San Carlos University today at 3:30.
- WhereCamp PDX, Oct. 17 - 19, Portland, OR - Dietrich Ayala demo'ing Geode.
- FSOSS, Oct. 24 - 24, Seneca College, Toronto - Several Mozilla speakers!
- Nonprofit Software Development Summit, Nov. 17 - 19, Oakland, CA: Please check it out if you are local!
- Green Festival, San Francisco, Nov. 14 - 16: Mozilla will have passes for 200 people. Please let Mary or Julie know if you want to attend.
- FOSSCamp, Mountain View, Dec. 5 - 6: Organized by Ubuntu folks. Please check it out if you are local!
Impact Mozilla
- since launch: 80,000 unique visitors to impactmozilla.com
- discussion forum: 90 members have joined
- submissions: approx. 100 emails received
- Please help us spread the word among student groups and marketing professionals... initial deadline is two weeks away!
Support
- Time for a new Support Firefox Day!
- Friday, November 21st
- Focus will be on localization, so the event will be split up into more than one time slot to allow people to participate around the globe.
- More info about the event to follow shortly.
Metrics
Evangelism
- Mozilla Developer Center
- CSS transforms documentation is now complete.
- CSS media queries documentation is now complete.
- The HTML 5
audio
element is now documented. - The HTML 5
video
element is now documented. - Geolocation is now documented.
- The
MozAfterPaint
event is now documented. - Documentation of worker threads has been pushed back to beta 2, since we're still working on matching the spec.
- Planning to deploy the Deki 8.08.1 update this Thursday, which picks up a few bug fixes and a couple of security improvements.
- Continuing to engage with MindTouch on plans for the next major release of Deki, which is shaping up to have a lot of big wins for MDC. We're a major factor in their design process for this release, once again. MindTouch is very eager to make us happy. See "Lyons" release's roadmap for details.
- 3.1b1 updates:
- Beta 1 outline
- devnews blog post with overview of developer features underway
- Please add comments if you have any
Labs
- Geode was released!
- Myk conducted experiment in easier access to sidebars in Firefox and would like feedback
- welcoming dion almaer & ben galbraith to mozilla full-time to lead a new developer tools lab
- Dan and Aza will be visiting Europe next week, more detailed schedule with events coming soon. Rough schedule:
- Sunday 19 - Monday 20: London
- Tuesday 21 - Thursday 23: Berlin
- Friday 24 - Sunday 26: Barcelona
Webdev, Add-ons, AMO
- AMO 4.0.2 open bugs & fixed bugs -- Code freeze Monday night, midnight
- Lars Lohn and Frank Griswold are in the final stages of re-engineering the Socorro filesystem -- read Lars' post about it or the SocorroFileSystem wiki page
- Austin King posted a patch for the Socorro topcrashers cron job (woot)
- Les Orchard worked on an activity feed for all public Mozilla activity -- looking at fleshing this out over the next few weeks, but here is a demo of his work
- pootle 1.2.0 and verbatim alpha released
- SUMO release schedule for the rest of 2008 [1], 0.7.1 in progress with freeze Thursday.
L10n
- L10n-drivers is working to create a testing strategy for the localization community. We are working on long-term testing that will carry over from release to release as well as developing release-specific testing plans. Mail sethb to learn more.
- L10n-drivers, l10n community and Mozilla marketing are creating and will slowly begin rolling out localized FF3 landing pages for 37 locales with the aim of fostering community and the visibility of all of FF3 language tools. Mail Laura Mesa or sethb to learn more.
- Firefox 3.1 beta 2, working on remaining locales to participate. We are shooting for a fully localized build.
Foundation Updates
Highlights
- Mark was in Mountain View for the Mozilla Foundation board meeting and various other meetings with Foundation and Corporation folks, including discussions on Foundation plans and budgets for 2008Q4 and 2009, possible new Foundation initiatives, Foundation/Corporation interactions, the Mozilla Store, and other topics.
- Frank Hecker made presentation about Mozilla's hybrid organization structure at a board meeting of Co-op America.
- The Mozilla Foundation is making a $5K grant to the TeX Users Group to support the Open Font Library initiative to make high-quality free fonts available for use with the @font-face font downloading feature implemented in Firefox 3.1 (bug 70132) and other browsers.
Program activities
- Education
- Zak worked to research who is doing what in open source education, to help in planning and making decisions about our own program efforts.
- Grants
- The Paciello Group is making good progress on their Foundation-funded project to develop a Firefox/Mozilla accessibility reporting panel and ARIA QA extension. Gez Lemon of TPG has produced a set of blog posts describing use of the extension for examining WAI ARIA live regions, document landmark roles, roles, and properties.
- CAs
- Public discussion of the CA inclusion request from Microsec Ltd is ongoing, but Frank wasn't able to do the preliminary decision on schedule, so now will need to push the overall CA schedule out.
- Frank worked with Kathleen Wilson to get her CVS access so that she can update the CA pending list herself.
Public communications and community outreach
- Powered by Mozilla
- David worked on the "Powered by Mozilla" design guidelines page with John Slater and Tara, and worked on a Bugzilla template for "Powered by Mozilla" logo requests
- www.mozilla.org
- David continued with archiving, redirect and bug triage work, posted new Mozilla Technologies and Mozilla Specifications pages, and archived the old Projects page.
Upcoming activities
- Gerv will be representing the Mozilla Foundation at the mySociety fifth birthday event (October 14, London).
- Mark and Frank will attend and participate in the FSOSS 2008 conference at Seneca College (October 23-24, Toronto).
- Mark will attend EU Mozilla Camp (October 25-26, Barcelona).
- We have a Mozilla Foundation staff retreat planned for late October (October 28-30, Mountain View).
- Zak will deliver the opening keynote for the AFUP (French PHP User Group) Forum PHP conference (December 8, Paris)