FOSDEM talk slides
Robert Kaiser
I've done a talk about current and future SeaMonkey development,
including suiterunner, yesterday at the FOSDEM conference.
If anyone's interested in the slides I used there, you can find them
online at http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/
Robert Kaiser
Rich Gray
Excellent. How was the talk received? Was there good discussion?
--
Rich (Pull thorn from address to e-mail me.)
SeaMonkey - Surfing the net has never been so suite!
hyc
Nice slides. Just fyi, I've been maintaining a private set of patches
to keep the Calendar Extension working with Seamonkey. I haven't tried
it with a Suiterunner build though. I just find Lightning's interface
to be too awkward...
Manuel Reimer
> Nice slides. Just fyi, I've been maintaining a private set of patches
> to keep the Calendar Extension working with Seamonkey. I haven't tried
> it with a Suiterunner build though. I just find Lightning's interface
> to be too awkward...
I think it's a good idea to get this patches in to the official calendar
extension. Could you file a bug at bugzilla and attach your patches?
CU
Manuel
Simon Paquet
There is no Calendar extension anymore. The Calendar Extension has been
officially discontinued by the developers of the Calendar Project.
Our focus now lies entirely on Lightning and Sunbird. Therefore patches
for the old Calendar extension will not be accepted if they only fix
CalExt bugs and not also bugs in Sunbird and/or Lightning.
Simon
--
Sunbird/Lightning Website Maintainer:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Sunbird/Lightning blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar
Howard Chu
I didn't submit them, because I assumed they would be rejected. I.e.,
the Calendar project's official policy is that the extension is no
longer supported. Are you saying you believe we can change their mind?
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
Jan Steffen
> Manuel Reimer wrote:
>> hyc wrote:
>>> Nice slides. Just fyi, I've been maintaining a private set of patches
>>> to keep the Calendar Extension working with Seamonkey. I haven't tried
>>> it with a Suiterunner build though. I just find Lightning's interface
>>> to be too awkward...
>>
>> I think it's a good idea to get this patches in to the official
>> calendar extension. Could you file a bug at bugzilla and attach your
>> patches?
>
> I didn't submit them, because I assumed they would be rejected. I.e.,
> the Calendar project's official policy is that the extension is no
> longer supported. Are you saying you believe we can change their mind?
>
Perhaps your patches can also help to make Lightning work in SeaMonkey.
That is still a goal of the developers:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313822
Then please go ahead and post them.
Jan (using calendar-0.2.0.20060116.xpi in SM1.1)
Robert Kaiser
> Perhaps your patches can also help to make Lightning work in SeaMonkey.
> That is still a goal of the developers:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313822
> Then please go ahead and post them.
No need to post any patches for that. Lighting _is_ already working in
suiterunner (as seen in my talk at FOSDEM). The only small patch needed
to make install it smoothly is in the bug you cited. Lightning will not
work on SeaMonkey 1.0.x/1.1.x or other xpfe-based SeaMonkey though, and
it's not planned to enable that.
Robert Kaiser
Benoit Renard
Not much discussion. I recall someone asking if ChatZilla worked (it
wasn't available in the build shown, even though KaiRo was sure it was),
and I asked about a possible compromise with toolkit's minver and maxver
extension property checking.
During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared and
mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The team
explained.
KaiRo can probably better answer how it was received, since he looked at
the crowd. :)
Robert Kaiser
> I recall someone asking if ChatZilla worked
Th was Gijs, naturally, who is on the Chatzilla team. I still got to
look into why it didn't show up on that build - that's interesting for
me as well...
Might just be https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371298
though, I vaguely remember I have unpacked a .tar.bz2 as root in a
non-user-writeable dir.
> and I asked about a possible compromise with toolkit's minver and maxver
> extension property checking.
BTW, in the talk about building extension on Sunday, it was massively
said that setting maxVer is a quite important thing due to
incompatibilities between versions. I guess EnigMail has felt such
problems a lot...
> During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared and
> mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The team
> explained.
Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that
both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.
Robert Kaiser
Philip Chee
> There is no Calendar extension anymore. The Calendar Extension has been
> officially discontinued by the developers of the Calendar Project.
> Our focus now lies entirely on Lightning and Sunbird. Therefore patches
> for the old Calendar extension will not be accepted if they only fix
> CalExt bugs and not also bugs in Sunbird and/or Lightning.
If you are unwilling to own and maintain the Calendar extension, would
it be possible for a new team to take ownership of this in the same way
that the SeaMonkey council took over the abandoned Mozilla Suite? Worst
case could someone on the SeaMonkey council fork the Calendar extension
and move it into the SM part of the CVS?
Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]This is just a hobby. Perfection is not required. Fun is.
* TagZilla 0.059.4
Simon Paquet
>> There is no Calendar extension anymore. The Calendar Extension has been
>> officially discontinued by the developers of the Calendar Project.
>
>> Our focus now lies entirely on Lightning and Sunbird. Therefore patches
>> for the old Calendar extension will not be accepted if they only fix
>> CalExt bugs and not also bugs in Sunbird and/or Lightning.
>
>If you are unwilling to own and maintain the Calendar extension, would
>it be possible for a new team to take ownership of this in the same way
>that the SeaMonkey council took over the abandoned Mozilla Suite?
I can not speak for the whole team, but I doubt that anyone would object
to this. The only problem is, the Calendar team did search for at least
6-12 months for a CalExt owner, but could not find one.
Besides I do not see a real use case in a fork. When Suiterunner becomes
the official Seamonkey, Lightning will run in Seamonkey with a very minor
patch (see Bug 313822), which will likely be incorporated into Lightning
once Suiterunner aka Seamonkey 1.5 gets official.
That will give you a working calendar extension out of the box without
the need to actively watch every checkin in mozilla/calendar for bustage
potential.
>Worst case could someone on the SeaMonkey council fork the Calendar
>extension and move it into the SM part of the CVS?
You'll have to ask the SM council for that. Although I read posts like
this <F_Wdne2CCoMIan_Y...@mozilla.org> from KaiRo, that the
council is not interested in a fork, which is understandable, since they
already too much code and too few developers.
Howard Chu
> And on the seventh day Philip Chee spoke:
>> it be possible for a new team to take ownership of this in the same way
>> that the SeaMonkey council took over the abandoned Mozilla Suite?
>
> I can not speak for the whole team, but I doubt that anyone would object
> to this. The only problem is, the Calendar team did search for at least
> 6-12 months for a CalExt owner, but could not find one.
I didn't see that before, but since CalExt is something I like, I can
step in here. Though it may be a moot point with Suiterunner.
> Besides I do not see a real use case in a fork. When Suiterunner becomes
> the official Seamonkey, Lightning will run in Seamonkey with a very minor
> patch (see Bug 313822), which will likely be incorporated into Lightning
> once Suiterunner aka Seamonkey 1.5 gets official.
True. Actually the bare-minimum patches needed to build CalExt under
Suiterunner are also pretty tiny. Since there seems to be some interest
I will post my patches to bugzilla shortly. (It's missing a few
niceties, like the Sunbird app icon, and the About dialog shows you the
Seamonkey version instead of the calendar version. I can probably trawl
thru CVS and get that straightened out later.)
> That will give you a working calendar extension out of the box without
> the need to actively watch every checkin in mozilla/calendar for bustage
> potential.
>
>> Worst case could someone on the SeaMonkey council fork the Calendar
>> extension and move it into the SM part of the CVS?
>
> You'll have to ask the SM council for that. Although I read posts like
> this <F_Wdne2CCoMIan_Y...@mozilla.org> from KaiRo, that the
> council is not interested in a fork, which is understandable, since they
> already too much code and too few developers.
Right, a fork would just be more pain.
Karsten Düsterloh
> BTW, in the talk about building extension on Sunday, it was massively
> said that setting maxVer is a quite important thing due to
> incompatibilities between versions.
But, actually, I think that especially this max-versioning is broken by
concept. Given you have an addon that does work on trunk and you set the
maxVer to the trunk value which is usually higher than any releases, you
will not only be broken by trunk changes (which is understandable, given
that its version doesn't change until about the next stable version),
but also any minor update release may break your extension!
E.g. you support TB 3 on trunk and they change an API between TB 2 and
TB 2.1...
Trunk versions/nightlies shouldn't enforce maxVersion.
>> During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared and
>> mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The team
>> explained.
>
> Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that
> both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.
I rather like the FF approach, because I can edit the stuff I type
there. But at least - after CTho's explanation - I understand now why
you don't like it, though I still do think that our floating find dialog
and our uneditable fayt are worse...
And as for the reception:
Compared with the ratio of downloaded copies of Firefox vs. SeaMonkey,
the number of SeaMonkey users/devs in the Mozilla room on FOSDEM was
tremendous! ;-)
Karsten
--
Feel free to correct my English. :)
Howard Chu
Simon Paquet
>>> If you are unwilling to own and maintain the Calendar extension, would
>>> it be possible for a new team to take ownership of this in the same way
>>> that the SeaMonkey council took over the abandoned Mozilla Suite?
>>
>> I can not speak for the whole team, but I doubt that anyone would object
>> to this. The only problem is, the Calendar team did search for at least
>> 6-12 months for a CalExt owner, but could not find one.
>
>I didn't see that before, but since CalExt is something I like, I can
>step in here.
Well, it was announced on the Calendar Project homepage for over six
months, but of course you're welcome to participate.
>> Besides I do not see a real use case in a fork. When Suiterunner becomes
>> the official Seamonkey, Lightning will run in Seamonkey with a very minor
>> patch (see Bug 313822), which will likely be incorporated into Lightning
>> once Suiterunner aka Seamonkey 1.5 gets official.
>
>True. Actually the bare-minimum patches needed to build CalExt under
>Suiterunner are also pretty tiny.
I know that it is still barely working, but you should not expect this to
continue for long. There are some upcoming changes, that will depend on
Toolkit functionalities, which will break CalExt even more.
Asrail
> Benoit Renard schrieb:
>> I recall someone asking if ChatZilla worked
>
> Th was Gijs, naturally, who is on the Chatzilla team. I still got to
> look into why it didn't show up on that build - that's interesting for
> me as well...
> Might just be https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371298
> though, I vaguely remember I have unpacked a .tar.bz2 as root in a
> non-user-writeable dir.
That's almost a joke.
Yeah Kaiser, you shouldn't expect CZ to appear on that menu.
Your steps are exactly what I did to reproduce that bug on Linux :D.
>> During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared
>> and mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The
>> team explained.
>
> Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that
> both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.
Help viewer doesn't have a status bar... so that is a nice workaround.
At least is "quick find" instead of the bloated UI (Control+F there).
Asrail
> Robert Kaiser, 26-02-2007 14:38:
>>> and mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The
>>> team explained.
>>
>> Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that
>> both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.
>
> Help viewer doesn't have a status bar... so that is a nice workaround.
> At least is "quick find" instead of the bloated UI (Control+F there).
>
By the way... please, never put something which the background color
flashes and turn red when you enter some text that wasn't found.
That's too distracting.
Philip Chee
> I didn't see that before, but since CalExt is something I like, I can
> step in here. Though it may be a moot point with Suiterunner.
Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an option?
And I suspect that some people would prefer the Calendar UI to the
rather cramped Lightning in SuiteRunne.
Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]Keyboard locked..Press F1 to continue
* TagZilla 0.059.4
Philip Chee
> And on the seventh day Howard Chu spoke:
>>True. Actually the bare-minimum patches needed to build CalExt under
>>Suiterunner are also pretty tiny.
> I know that it is still barely working, but you should not expect this to
> continue for long. There are some upcoming changes, that will depend on
> Toolkit functionalities, which will break CalExt even more.
Um, SuiteRunner == toolkit
Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]Is it still paranoia if they ARE ALL out to get me???
* TagZilla 0.059.4
Simon Paquet
>>> True. Actually the bare-minimum patches needed to build CalExt under
>>> Suiterunner are also pretty tiny.
>>
>> I know that it is still barely working, but you should not expect this to
>> continue for long. There are some upcoming changes, that will depend on
>> Toolkit functionalities, which will break CalExt even more.
>
> Um, SuiteRunner == toolkit
Yeah, I misread the Suiterunner as Seamonkey, although I'm not so sure,
whether this was also a glitch on Howard's side ;-)
--
Simon Paquet
Sunbird/Lightning website maintainer
Project website: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Developer blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar
Simon Paquet
>> I didn't see that before, but since CalExt is something I like, I can
>> step in here. Though it may be a moot point with Suiterunner.
>
> Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
> it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an
> option?
I know that the Suite rationale was always to include everything but the
kitchen sink, but I get the impression that Seamonkey wants to move away
(at least a little bit) from that and not include more "options" into a
product already full of "options".
And as I said before, this will be a full fork. The Calendar Project
developers will make absolutely no effort to test their changes in an
abandoned extension running on an (currently) unsupported product and
fix resulting bustages.
> And I suspect that some people would prefer the Calendar UI to the
> rather cramped Lightning in SuiteRunne.
Lightning's UI is still evolving. We will most likely move away from
the combined mail/calendar mode to a separate calendar mode, which can
be switched on and off.
Neil
> I know that the Suite rationale was always to include everything but
> the kitchen sink
That reminds me, I need to ask Mook to update the kitchensink extension
to work with suiterunner ;-)
--
Warning: May contain traces of nuts.
Robert Kaiser
> Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
> it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an option?
We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an
extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.
We might think of including Lighting some time when we're stable on
toolkit and Lightning is well-tested in that configuration and works
reasonably well.
But Simon is right in one thing: We won't include everything just
because it's available. Our goal is to ship an all-in-one app suite that
doesn't need installation of a bunch of extensions to be usable for a
big part of our target audience. Our goal is not to include everything
someone could need some time, and our goal is not to include stuff that
is not well-tested.
Robert Kaiser
Philip Chee
> That reminds me, I need to ask Mook to update the kitchensink extension
> to work with suiterunner ;-)
The Spirit will thank you.
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=mozilla&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=will+eisner+kitchen+sink&spell=1>
Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
* TagZilla 0.059.4
Eddie-MacG3
> If anyone's interested in the slides I used there, you can find them
> online at http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/
>
> Robert Kaiser
Robert,
Bad link:
Open Discussion
http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/slide_end.html
Lower RH corner:
" http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ "
But link is to:
http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/index.html
rather than to:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/
Eddie
Robert Kaiser
This is intentional. Just because the splash screen image has the
project page URL doesn't mean the image needs to be linked there.
Robert Kaiser
Robert Kaiser
> Excellent. How was the talk received? Was there good discussion?
To me it seemed that the talk was well-recieved, but for details, you
gotta ask the audience ;-)
Some people afterwards told me they were impressed to see suiterunner
actually running, as they would never have expected that we'll manage to
do the toolkit transition when we started the project two years ago.
Many thanks to Mark Banner for doing lots and lots of work to get this
suiterunner project in shape!
Robert Kaiser
Simon Paquet
> I've done a talk about current and future SeaMonkey development,
> including suiterunner, yesterday at the FOSDEM conference.
>
> If anyone's interested in the slides I used there, you can find them
> online at http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/
Seeing the content of the slides and your presentations of the past,
I'm wondering whether I shouldn't present Sunbird/Lightning in the next
year, since your slides were pretty high-level, at least for someone,
who is watching the development pretty closely.
How was the general level of the Q&A session afterwards? Only high-level
questions, which could be answered pretty easily or also nitty-gritty
tech talk?
Cya
Simon
Benoit Renard
I think the non-UI is fine, really. I was too caught up in listening to
what everyone said to object. You can edit your search to some extent.
Just use Backspace and then continue typing.
Howard Chu
Hear hear! In the few months since I last looked at it, it has come a
long way. So much that I'm no longer using my XPFE trunk build any more.
Howard Chu
> Philip Chee schrieb:
>> Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
>> it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an option?
> We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an
> extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.
I can look into providing extensions for Windows and Linux-x86. I could
also take a run at Linux x86_64 if there's any need. Aside from that
folks will just have to patch their source trees.
> We might think of including Lighting some time when we're stable on
> toolkit and Lightning is well-tested in that configuration and works
> reasonably well.
> But Simon is right in one thing: We won't include everything just
> because it's available. Our goal is to ship an all-in-one app suite that
> doesn't need installation of a bunch of extensions to be usable for a
> big part of our target audience. Our goal is not to include everything
> someone could need some time, and our goal is not to include stuff that
> is not well-tested.
Those are of course two reasonable points. But I personally have always
used the Suite with Calendar, I don't consider it an extension. I view
this recent effort as repairing a regression/loss of functionality, not
adding anything new. And stuff only gets really well tested over the
course of time, as more users pound on it.
Anyway... I didn't post here to make a major statement, just to make a
little note. I figured if it had gone this far, it probably wasn't
important to many people besides me.
Robert Kaiser
> Seeing the content of the slides and your presentations of the past,
> I'm wondering whether I shouldn't present Sunbird/Lightning in the next
> year, since your slides were pretty high-level, at least for someone,
> who is watching the development pretty closely.
I think that would be quite interesting - most people there are either
localizers or people working on their specific projects within the
Mozilla world, and they usually don't follow all other projects closely,
so getting a heads-up what's going on there is always interesting.
> How was the general level of the Q&A session afterwards? Only high-level
> questions, which could be answered pretty easily or also nitty-gritty
> tech talk?
Some of both, but nobody has a problem if you say "I don't work myself
on that part, please ask XXX" if something is too techy for someone who
doesn't actively write code. :)
Robert Kaiser
Howard Chu
> Philip Chee schrieb:
>> Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
>> it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an option?
>
> We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an
> extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.
I've uploaded the extension for SeaMonkey 1.x to my web site.
http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/mozilla/calendar-linux-x86.xpi
http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/mozilla/calendar-win32.xpi
These will probably not work with trunk/SeaMonkey 1.5. I have a
different build for trunk/Suiterunner, but I haven't gotten the
installer right yet.
Georg Maaß
> We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an
> extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.
But I think the calendar is more value in the office than chatzilla.