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status update

maintained by Chris Nelson <chrisn@statecollege.com>

Last Updated Sunday, April 11th, 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

  • Nicholas Ambrose sent in two more patches for fixing performance of XPCOM and code cleanup. He is clearly a Friend of the Tree -SD

Module Updates
Javascript
April 9
Submitted by Scott Furman <fur@netscape.com>

Scott writes:

"McCabe sez' we have more build support for the xpidl IDL compiler on Win32.  'cvs co buildtools'  for the necessary libraries (or download them using ftp).  Then look at buildtools/windows/install.bat to see how to put the files in the right subdirs under MOZ_TOOLS so as to build the XPIDL compiler.  We hope to turn on xpidl as part of the standard build sometime next week, so get ready now!

We're looking for volunteers to port the xptcall library to your platform of choice.  (If your platform does not have xptcall support, you will shortly lose the ability to run new Mozilla builds.)  Get the inside scoop on xptcall from John Bandauer, including porting hints"

XPToolkit
April 12
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • Made most of our M4 features on time:
    • File picker for Open/Save dialogs
    • Clipboard on Win32, Mac
    • Modal Dialogs on Win32, Mac
    • Sizing windows
    • Closing windows
    • XUL fragments.
    • Window Titles.
  • Fixed remaining M4 bugs.
  • Implemented scriptable persistent chrome.  (hyatt)
Lowlights
  • Missed several features committed for M4:
    • Linux clipboard (very close).
    • Linux modal dialogs (lacking GTK expertise - HELP!).
    • Build XUL from a stream (very close).
    • Keybinding (delayed due to dependency on Gecko event handling).
    • Get windows off the netlib thread.
    • Folder picker (didn't quite make it).
    • Scroll Bar (decided we needed box layout manager more).
    Few, if any, of these should be holding anything else up.  If they are, please let me know and we'll make every effort to get them done soon enough in M5 that you can make your M5 committments.  Some (e.g., keybinding, scrollbar), may be rescheduled to M6 due to lack of demand or dependencies beyond our control.
Accomplishments
  • Modified nsFileWidget to use nsFileSpecs, which are needed on Mac OS to reliably disambiguate file system objects. (sdagley)
  • Implemented GetFile/Folder and PutPile wrappers on nsFileWidget. (sdagley, mcafee, rods, hyatt)
  • Reimplemented toolbars and toolboxes on top of new box layout manager. (evaughan)
  • Implemented incremental reflow for layout manager. (evaughan)
  • Fixed some bugs in min and max size on layout manager.  (evaughan)
  • Moved all CSS out of the navigator.xul file and created navigator.css.  (evaughan)
  • NavServices implementation for nsFileWidget on Mac OS. (pinkerton, sdagley)
  • Turned on clipboard code on Win32, Mac. (rods, pinkerton)
  • Rewrote the downloadable chrome spec to include specific M4 information and sample code.  (hyatt)
  • Expanded the chrome registry to include additional entries for localization, platform-specific chrome, and for behavioral chrome packages (in addition to skin and content, which were already there). (hyatt)
  • Completed  initial pass at getting D&D working, including ability to drag text to and from MS-Word. (rods)
  • Completed implementation of new nsFileWidget methods (including Folder picker for windows) (rods)
Decisions
Issues
  • Steve Dagley had long discussion(s) with Bob Jung and Tague Griffith regarding I18N work (UniCode and double byte input). Consensus is that several groups are going to be touched by these changes, and it's not just an XPToolkit task.  Tague will bring up some Mac specific issues at next week's MacDev meeting and should be addressing the Wednesday Gecko and Seamonkey meetings to inform the potentially affected groups that there's work to be done.
  • Met with security guys to begin work on a security model for RDF, XUL, and downloadable chrome. (hyatt,scc)
  • Support for FEAlert/Check/Confirm dialogs has grown into a major snake. SCC will be attacking it with a machete next week, please either help him or get out of the way.
People
  • DanM and SDagley are on vacation in Hawaii next week.
Mozilla QA
April 9
Submitted by Jan Leger <leger@netscape.com>

Jan Leger has this week's QA update:

  • Test Plans are starting to be posted. See Mail/News QA areas for primary progress being made.
  • Contest naming winner for TCMS (Testcase Management System) still not decided....coming shortly.
  • Still on schedule for posting of Basic Functional test cases and a Test Harness for automated testcase to be run via javacript by end of April; putting together interface into system now.
  • M4 looking good, down to about 50 more bugs to fix. Should declare victory this coming Monday.
  • QA will be pushing for a platform Parity/Stability phase next. We want to make sure the Mac and Linux keep up with Win32 development!
PerlConnect
April 9
Submitted by Mike McCabe <mccabe@netscape.com>

PerlConnect builds on unixes out of the box with 'gmake -f Makefile.ref JS_PERLCONNECT=true' in the js/src directory. Thanks to Dave Neuer for linking help and a nifty perl script to handle configuration differences. And thanks again to Vladimir Livshits for providing this kool technology.

Editor
April 9
Submitted by Akkana Peck <akkana@netscape.com>

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

"We've been working on stability and M4 features:

  • Changing text attributes (bold, italic, underline) works much better now
  • Backend tree iterator work -- fixed some selection-related crashes
  • Fixed some caret bugs
  • Added insert link and insert image (sans dialogs, which will be coming soon)
  • Added methods to the editor app core to add functionality in the editor testbed, mail/news, and other javascript clients of the editor, and for use by dialogs

Ongoing work (watch for some of this next week):

  • Dialogs -- the XP dialogs are almost usable and should be appearing soon for features like Insert Link
  • More work on getting layout information for selection
  • IDL'ifying selection; improvements in the editor app core API"
NGLayout
April 9
Submitted by Troy Chevalier <troy@netscape.com>

Troy writes in with this update:

"Let's see. Mostly bug fixing. The only new feature to mention is that :before and :after generated content is now working. We support most of the 'content' values except counter and marker, i.e. we handle string, URI for an image, ATTR, open-quote, and close-quote"

XML Status
April 9
Submitted by Nisheeth Ranjan <nisheeth@netscape.com>

Expat is now enabled by default on all platforms. Look out for it in the M4 milestone release on mozilla.org. Another new thing people will see is that XML well-formedness errors now get displayed in viewer/apprunner. Currently, this "error reporting in browser" functionality only works for XML files. Errors in XUL and RDF files get dumped to the console. This will change once we factor the code better among the XML/RDF/XUL content sinks. Another new feature enabled because of expat is internal entities. Support for external entities is planned in the near future. Anybody out there wanna help out with rounding out our XML implementation, please email me. Thanks.

XPCom
April 9
Submitted by Suresh Duddi <dp@netscape.com>
  • Nicholas Ambrose sent in two more patches for fixing performance of XPCOM and code cleanup. He is clearly a Friend of the tree.
  • We are cleaning up xpcom code and increasing stability of XPCOM
M4 Status
April 9
Submitted by Chris Hofmann <chofmann@netscape.com>

QA reports indicate builds from this morning are looking much better.

Builds are spinning right now with latest fixes from ramiro, law, amusil,slamm, karnaze, and joki. These are the last of the M4 candidates built from the trunk.

Tree tagging and branching is also underway. cyeh will send mail with branch name details later today.

Later tonight or early Saturday the trunk will open for M5.

There are a handful of fixes we may want to consider applying to the branch on Monday or early next week if/when they become available. We are down to 42 bugs with some clean up work on the bug list still expected from jevering, karnaze and others. Please stay on top of bugs that appear on the M4 list.

nisheeth is also looking at some possible XML problems that we wouldn't want to ship M4 with if these problems can be verified.

I'll be around or pageable (page-chofmann@netscape.com) to review checkin's on the M4 branch over the weekend.

M4 looks like it will wrap up early next week.

Grendel (Java Mail/News client)
April 9
Submitted by Giao Nguyen <grail@cafebabe.org>

Giao has this update for us:

"Both Edwin and myself are massively swamped with work. For the last 3 weeks, the only work with Grendel has been done through contributors. That's the bad news. Now, the good news.

We found Will Scullin! Will was one of the original authors of Grendel prior to the hacker done by Jeff. Will has looked at our woes with TreeTable and offered a few suggestions. It will get fixed eventually!

Mauro Botelho is attempting the MDB interface. He's got the basic interface specs down and is implementing the first run of things with an XML store. Hopefully his experience will help out the Mozilla mail-news effort."

Previous Updates