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status update

maintained by Chris Nelson <chrisn@statecollege.com>

Last Updated Sunday, April 18th, 1999

This status update page is updated every weekend. To get updates and news throughout the week , I invite you to check out mozillaZine, a site I maintain devoted to Mozilla advocacy.

Previous Updates

Friends of the Tree

  • Edwin Woudt contributed a bunch of toolbar icons based on the lavender monocolor theme we've been using. Although he mainly did them for Grendel, we may adopt them too. - Phil P.

Module Updates
XPToolkit
April 19
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • Upon seeing my plea for help on Linux modal dialogs in last week's progress report, several developers volunteered their time, expertise, pointers, and even some code!  It is wonderful to see bazaar-style development at work on an open source project.  Many thanks to Michael K Vance, Tobias Gerdin, and Netscape's own Syd Logan and Ramiro Estrugo.  We really appreciate your extra efforts on this, and with your help we now expect to bring this feature online for M5.
Lowlights
Accomplishments
  1. Fixed 6 bugs in the last week, see our Fixed Bug List for details.
  2. Developed a sandboxing mechanism to separate content from chrome. (hyatt)
  3. Conducted design/architecture reviews of the work on Clipboard and Drag & Drop. (scc, rods, pinkerton, mcafee, evaughan)
  4. Completed Windows Drag & Drop (drag into and drag out of works) (rods)
  5. Completed XP portion of Drag & Drop  (rods)
  6. Completed changes to nsITransferable and created a new nsIGenericTransferable interface  (rods)
  7. Checked in completed nsFileDialog work (rods)
  8. Coding on clipboard for GTK is done, but problems with event handling remain, callbacks for selection notification are not firing. (mcafee)
  9. Got dynamic menus working on Windows, still need to checkin. (saari)
  10. Completed work on tri-state checkboxes. (pinkerton)
Priorities
  1. Linux clipboard. (mcafee)
  2. Linux modal dialogs. (rods,mcafee,syd,briareos@lokigames.com)
  3. Linux folder picker. (mcafee)
  4. Get dynamic menus working on GTK. (saari)
  5. Menu enabling/disabling (saari)
  6. Reading XUL from streams. (scc)
  7. Get window.xxx() calls working. (hyatt)
  8. Fix M5 bugs (all)


Decisions

Issues
  • Getting the window.XXX() calls working from JavaScript in AppRunner is looking like a much larger task than we had counted on.  It is still possible for M5, but is certainly at risk. (hyatt)
  • Regular build breakage and instability is once again wasting a lot of time. This is biting us on every platform but mainly Linux, where it is hampering all of the developers every day. Many are wasting a total of a day or more each week on this, trying to get a build, trying to fix the underlying problems, and trying to avoid getting clobbered by it again.  We desparately need to get this problem under control for good. (mcafee et. al.)
People
  • SDagley and DanM were on vacation in Hawaii this week, but will hopefully return fully recharged and ready for action on Monday.
NGLayout
April 16
Submitted by Troy Chevalier <troy@netscape.com>

Troy writes in with this update:

"I don't think there's too much interesting. Kipp's working on implementing :first-line and :first-letter, and I'm working on fixed background. Other than that it's mostly bug fixing"

ImgLib
April 16
Submitted by Pam Nunn <pnunn@netscape.com>

Here's the ImgLib update from Pam Nunn:

The XPCOMified image library has been checked into a branch, IMGLIB_DECODERS_BRANCH.

The code has been tested on NT, linux, and mac. The build files may be a bit shakey, particularly on mac. I'll carpool to the tip after the build files are retested.

This structural change is the first step to having dropin inline decoders for Gecko. This version does not yet implement mime type smarts which will allow anyone to drop in a new decoder into a installed browser by adding the decoder component to the components directory and assigning mimetype/extension. The mappings available now are GIF, JPG, PNG.

The bugs you all know and love, are still with us. I have changes for several bugs lined up to test as soon as the api has landed.

I am still making changes to the make files so keep updating. There will soon be a doc file in mozilla/modules/libimg/doc.

XPApps
April 16
Submitted by Bill Law <law@netscape.com>

Bill Law has some news from XPApps:

"I added a couple new features to apprunner this week:

1. "Edit->Page Source" now works.

2. "File->Open" now opens a new apprunner window with the selected page.

These features deploy some clever XUL and JavaScript that might be of interest to other XUL coders.

I also fixed the problem where multiple apprunner windows all sent their commands to the first window (e.g., typing in a URL in a second window will now actually load that page in the window in which you type).

I'm going to work on cleaning up the "file download" dialogs and on adding support for Search (find in document) next week."

Editor
April 16
Submitted by Akkana Peck <akkana@netscape.com>

Here's Akkana's update on the status of the editor (composer):

  • "Design work involving typing rules; see http://www.mozilla.org/editor/rules.html for details.
  • Significant work on dialogs, which are almost ready to go; our first dialog will probably be the Insert Link dialog. Lots of work going on in how to define the API in the editor app core -- see discussion on the editor newsgroup.
  • IDL-ized selection; now external Javascript clients will be able to query the selection. Lots of other work happening on the IDL interfaces for editor actions.
  • More work on the underpinnings of items like Make Bold, Insert Link and so on, to make the code more reusable both by other C++ editor methods and by Javascript.
  • More work on Text Services, which will be used by the spell checker (its first client), find/replace, and many other clients.
  • The beginnings of automated test routines; some test-related items have been added to the editor menubar, so keep an eye open as more tests turn on over the next few weeks."
Mail/News
April 16
Submitted by Phil Peterson <phil@netscape.com>

Phil Peterson has news regarding the Mail/News client:

This week

  • Mac mailnews is all checked in and ready to build. To enable it, change $build{mailnews} from 0 to 1 in the perl scripts.
  • Our Mac stuff isn't on Tinderbox yet since the release team builds the Mac product in a RAM disk, and with the addition of this new code we've outgrown the RAM disk. The release team is working on it.
  • Most M4 commitments met. The milestones doc has been updated to reflect what we actually did in M4.
  • IMAP is making great progress, but there's a lot to do. Usable IMAP projected for M6 (May 18).
  • 4.5-style preferences dialog is integrated.
  • Ongoing engineering work on multiple accounts, MIME i18n, news.
  • Sorting and (top-level) threading in the thread pane works.
  • New UI design mostly completed for the message composition window; spec is posted to mozilla.org, with agreed-upon internal review.
  • Our XUL now conforms to the localizability guidelines
  • We're now using the XPFE chrome URLs.

Next week

Footprint watch (optimized builds, uncompressed)

  • Win32: 574,720 (yes, that's in bytes) after great de-bloating work from Scott MacGregor and Rich Pizzarro. We were at 1,427,344 on April 2.
  • Linux: This is the first time we've looked closely at it. Not as bad as Win32 was, but we need to investigate the size differential.
  • Mac: Coming soon
Win32 Linux (stripped)
msglocal.dll
110,960
liblocalmail.so
320,440
msgcompose.dll
81,280
libmsgcompose.so
179,048
mailnews.dll
68,368
libmailnews.so
137,932
mime.dll
77,184
libmime.so
136,624
msgnews.dll
42,224
libmsgnews.so
99,392
msgdb.dll
134,176
libmsgdb.so
97,528
linked in
n/a
libmsgbaseutil.so
70,988
mimect-vcard.dll
36,512
libmimect-vcard.so
63,324
htmlemitter.dll
8,512
libhtmlemitter.so
14,972
xmlemitter.dll
8,512
libxmlemitter.so
14,292
rawemitter.dll
6,992
librawemitter.so
12,716
574,720
1,147,256

Javascript
April 16
Submitted by Scott Furman <fur@netscape.com>

Scott writes:

"Mike McCabe (et al) got the building of xpidl into the client build for Win32 and Unix. Much pain and suffering was felt. He also removed the NSPR dependency from xptcall, clearing the way for Patrick Beard, who landed a Mac port of xpidl. Patrick checked in Mac projects and changes to make XPConnect and supporting tools work on Mac PPC. This includes Roger Lawrence's xptcall code (which is untested at this point). Building XPIDL on the Mac is not yet finished, however.

Chris Toshok checked in xptcall port for FreeBSD and NetBSD on x86.

John Bandauer has:

  • fixed bugs in XPIDL and XPConnect
  • made the Components object correctly expose (and clean up) XPCOM 'services'
  • implemented a simple interactive XPConnect-enabled JS shell for testing
  • designed and partially implementing a security listener scheme to support an external "security manager" that can monitor and 'filter' xpconnect calls for:
    • creating wrappers around interfaces,
    • using component manager to create an object instance
    • using service manager to get at a service
    • making individual method calls (and property get/set)
Next up on John's list is a scheme using generated makefiles to simplify adding idl files to the build while supporting all the correct targets and dependencies."

Previous Updates