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status update

maintained by Chris Nelson <chrisn@statecollege.com>

Last Updated Sunday, May 2, 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

Thanks to michael.lowe@bigfoot.com for a patch to get the correct file URL for "IE Favorites" on Windows 95/98/NT instead of just guessing a default. - RJC

Module Updates
XPToolkit
May 2
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • Scott Collins and Mike Pinkerton have nailed Bug 4127, "We are leaking the entire WebShell window", aka The Mother of All Leaks.  Not only did they track it down day and night, fixing several cycles and many other leaks while implementing a new, explicit ownership model, but they also posted documentation at <
  • http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/Ownership.html>
       <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/nsCOMPtr/ >, et al.  Hopefully, this will help prevent similar problems in the future.
Lowlights
  • In spite of some breakthroughs on window.open over this weekend, we still recommend disabling it for M5.  We have recently discovered  days of unplanned work associated with it that are just now being placed on the schedule.  It also probably doesn't work on Linux, since it's dependent on the nested event loop actually working in the same fashion that modal dialogs are.
Accomplishments
  1. Fixed 14 bugs in the last week, see our Fixed Bug List for details.
  2. Got Windows modal dialogs UI to look (application) modal. (danm)
  3. Reworked on and re-implemented the D&D interfaces and classes, adding a nsIDragSession interface. (rods)
  4. Implemented menu item enabling/disabling on GTK. (saari)
  5. Implemented Linux Folder picker. (mcafee)
Priorities
  1. Fix the remaining open M5 bugs (currently 5).
  2. Modal dialogs from Netlib snake. (danm)
  3. D&D document (rods)
  4. Font discovery (rods)
  5. Get next box fixes finished. (evaughan)
  6. Fix tab visibility and focus issues. (evaughan)
  7. Get tab docs up.  (evaughan)
  8. Begin scroll bar. (evaughan)
  9. Drag & Drop (pinkerton, mcafee)
  10. Convert AppCores to Components. (scc)
  11. Make window.open (as well as our modal dialogs) actually work when spawned from proxy events placed into the queue from netlib, and other window.open follow-up work.  (hyatt)
  12. Post key-binding spec (sdagley, saari)
NGLayout
April 30
Submitted by Kipp Hickman <kipp@netscape.com>

Kipp Hickman writes in with this update:

"1. I checked an implementation of :first-letter that supports "float" (yay). It seems to work properly, but of course its new so I'm sure david baron will find at least one bug. :-)

2. Fixed a number of widget bugs on linux and improved stability some more.

3. Fixed the viewer and its web crawler to properly crawl across frameset pages. Now the viewer is much more usable when crawling and we can crawl over the standard tests which makes smoke' testing before checkins simpler."

Editor
April 30
Submitted by Akkana Peck <akkana@netscape.com>

Akkana Peck has our Editor update::

A lot of things changed out from under us during M5, so one M5 goal has been getting the editor to be at least as stable as M4 was, plus some new features, including some international support, typing rules, beginnings of a few dialogs (notably find and insert link), and lots of change character property commands (e.g. make bold, etc.) Typing performance seems better in M5 due to fixes in other libraries.

Meanwhile, we've made good progress on lots of backend work which should show up in M6: spell checking (using the new Text Services interface, so it will be easy to plug in other spell checkers and related text services), more international support, more work on Find/Replace, Save/Open File, lots more dialogs and other UI work, work toward inserting html fragments and mail message quoting support, up/down support for selection, and inserting lots of specific html elements such as tables, rules and lists.

Our schedule is now on mozilla: see http://www.mozilla.org/editor/milestones.html for our list of who's working on what.

RDF
April 30
Submitted by Robert Churchill <rjc@netscape.com>

Robert Churchill has this RDF update for us::

  • Added support for bookmark separators o Made sorting code "smart" so that it now will sort IN-BETWEEN separators when sorting on the name column.
  • Now write out "bookmarks.html" on a Flush() [including when a new bookmark is added]
  • Small bug fixes. Thanks to michael.lowe@bigfoot.com for a patch to get the correct file URL for "IE Favorites" on Windows 95/98/NT instead of just guessing a default.
  • Just checked in a fix so that FTP now works (again) on the Mac. This means that FTP in RDF now works on the Mac as well... Mac users can enjoy browsing remote sites via FTP thanks to RDF.
Aurora
April 30
Submitted by Chris Waterson <waterson@netscape.com>

Chris Waterson has this update on the Aurora "sidebar":

Added the "flash panel" to the sidebar: see http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/flash-spec.html for details on how it works -- er, how it will work.

Got the last pieces of XPIDL into the Unix and Win32 builds, so the RDF APIs are now 100% scriptable via XPConnect. Check out http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/rdf/resources/flash.js for an example of how to use it.

Fixed several refcounting bugs for M5.

Mail/News
April 30
Submitted by Phil Peterson <phil@netscape.com>

Phil Peterson has news regarding the Mail/News client:

This week

  • Lots of exciting IMAP stuff. Folders can be displayed in the folder pane, the contents of a mailbox can be displayed in the thread pane, and messages can be displayed in the message pane.
  • The Mac version of mail/news is part of official builds from the release team, but the build process hasn't proven itself enough to be added to Tinderbox. We have platform parity issues on Mac.
  • Multiple accounts backend is mostly done. For the brave, pref details are shown in the smoketest doc.
  • Subscribed newsgroups can be displayed in folder pane based on newsrc files
  • Lots of spec design work on the Address Book. The spec will probably be posted to mozilla.org next week.
  • More planning for auto-complete between mail/news, editor, and browser groups.
  • Bug fixing for M5 (42 total, 25 by m/n engrs), lots of bug triage of Seamonkey and 4.x bugs.
Next week
  • M6 features.
  • Multiple account UI to be added.
  • Newsgroup contents to be loaded in thread pane, and news articles to be loaded in message pane.
  • Work on message composition to start up again
  • Mail/news engrs will be making a pass through our components to:
    • make sure we check the return value from allocations for nsnull (duh)
    • make good use of nsCOMPtr to improve reference counting
    • make good use of NS_WITH_SERVICE to improve reference counting
Footprint watch

With the addition of Mac numbers this week, the table was too big to be readable. Here's a summary, but I have details if anyone wants 'em.

  • Windows: 718kb. IMAP component added this week
  • Mac: 918kb, and not building IMAP or news yet. First time measuring Mac.
  • Linux: 1.4mb, and not building IMAP yet. libmailnews.so bloat from last week is gone this week.

Fine print: We're measuring optimized (and stripped) code, but not resources (JS, XUL, GIF). We can start measuring resources too when we start putting that stuff in JARs.

Javascript and XPConnect
April 30
Submitted by Scott Furman <fur@netscape.com>

Scott writes:

"First, I want to repeat this important public service announcement from last week:

If the xptcall library is not ported to your platform, you will very shortly not be able to run Mozilla at all.
(So, don't say we didn't warn you.)  If you don't know what xptcall is or why it's necessary, read this.  Here's the current status of xptcall ports.  Oh, and if you're feeling up to the task, check out jband's nifty xptcall porting guideRoger Lawrence's  Mac and Solaris Sparc xptcall code is in the tree and will be tested, debugged, and enabled at the beginning of next week.

On a less threatening note, XPConnect is now in use by Mozilla's RDF, thanks to tremendous help from Chris Waterson.

The next project to tackle is the build system extensions that handle processing of XPIDL files.  We need to have these systems working on all platforms so that we can switch from checking in generated files to generating those files at build time. We intend to fully avoid a situation in which generated files are checked into the repository for some platforms and generated on others, which has been the cause of disasters in the past when someone forgot to checkin changes to the generated files.  Mike McCabe is working on ironing out Unix build issues.  Patrick Beard has done great work to get the XPIDL tool set working on Mac, and he is shifting his attention to integrating it into the Mac build system.

Finally, if all this XPConnect, XP-this, XP-that mumbo-jumbo is giving you a headache, check out jband's helpful roadmap.
 

JavaScript status:

At long last, we landed the changes from our JavaScript development branch.  Alas, the changes are not too exciting - merely several months worth of minor bug fixes."

Previous Updates