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status update

maintained by Christopher Blizzard <blizzard@mozilla.org>

Last Updated Thursday May 25, 2000

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

Previous Updates

Module Updates
XPToolkit
May 21
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>
Summary
  • Chrome reorg for skins is finished, and other enhancements to the chrome registry are in.  See below for details.
  • All basic XPToolkit features needed/promised for PR2 are done.
  • Basic menu scrolling is in.
  • Implemented skin/package/locale uninstallation.
  • Implemented "safe" skins (no scripts allowed in skin XBL).
Highlights
 
  • Mike Pinkerton (pinkerton)
  • Fixed translucent dragging in mail on macos
  • Fixed lots more xpPopup regressions.
  • Chris Saari and Daniel Matejka  have completed the directory reorganization of the chrome for skins.  This was a very painstaking  task, full of many details which took long, hard work by both to get done.  (danm,saari)

  •  
  • Eric Vaughan (evaughan):
  • Got all menus just about as fast as native ones on all platforms.
  • Got basic menu scrolling to work, with scrollbars.
  • Stuart Parmenter (pavlov):
  • Removed the unix toolkit service.
  • Removed all uses of NS_NewTimer to fix static linkage problems.  This should reduce disk footprint on unix by not having lots of copies of NS_NewTimer duplicated everywhere.
  • Worked with some of Blizzard's code to make gfx and unix a component on unix.  This should allow us to get rid of nsSetupRegistry.cpp someday.. yay!
  • Working on nsbeta2+ bug 31096 (mailnews file->save as

  • problem).  Will have to change the filepicker APIs a tad to provide for what is used here.
  • David Hyatt  (hyatt):
  • Implemented dynamic stylesheet support in the chrome registry.
  • Enabled profile-specific package installation in the chrome registry.
  • Implemented skin/package/locale uninstallation.
  • Implemented "safe" skins (no scripts allowed in skin XBL).

  •  
  • The XPToolkit team resolved 94 bugs in the last week, fixing 57 of  these, including 2 new features and 13 PDT+.  For details, see our resolved bug list.

  •  

     

    Lowlights

    • Some remaining XPToolkit 'feature' work didn't make the PR2 cutoff, but we plan to try get exceptions for doing them later.  Note that most of these are really performance  and polish, not new features. We are tracking them as features because they are large and/or risky.
    Priorities
     
  • pinkerton:
  •  36479 Win98 crasher w/ multiple monitors.
  • saari:
  •  35100 can't type after using <popup>, e.g., the colorpicker
  •  35503 Menus don't draw when using overflow:auto internally

  •  31118 crash while processing netcenter's activation pages.
  • hyatt:
  • 39392 Crashing when adding buddies to buddy list

  •  
  • evaughan:
    •  39699  No submenus if scrollbar
  • pavlov:
  • Finish bug 31096.
  • 12761 JS animations unreasonably slow.
  • 3025 file selection dialog forgets filenames on chdir
  • danm:
  •  35921 event notification outlives its event
  • 36361 Open Web Location won't load page, sometimes crashes
  • 39459 Window layering on Mac is  horked
  • Issues
    • David Hyatt estimates that the amount of time required to fix the nsbeta2+ bugs in the current tree implementation is less than that required to rewrite trees on top of box grid.  We had already planned to do this work post-PR2, so fixing bugs in the old code would only be of use for PR2.  Dave would prefer doing the rewrite now, which would introduce more PR2 risk, but would probably reduce risk for the project overall.
    • Is there a 'Do the right thing' clause in the current PDT Process?  Engineers are frequently encountering bugs that seem to be more important and more urgent than their current 'approved' bugs.  Following the nomination process takes time, and sometimes the decision still has to be appealed.  We need some means of circumventing the process when it is just getting in the way and impeding rapid progress.


    People

    Brian Ryner starts tomorrow, Monday, May 22!  Woohoo!!!  :-) Unfortunately, corporate indoctrination now consumes an entire day.  8-(

    Tracking:

    Durations of remaining XPToolkit feature work for PR2:

    Previous:

    DanM:  0 d
    EVaughan: 5 d
    Hyatt: .5 d
    Pavlov: 2 d
    Pinkerton: 2 d
    Saari: 2 d
    Total: 11.5
    Current:

             Total: 0  (doesn't include leftover 'features' proposed for post PR2.

    Composer
    May 22
    Submitted by Beth Epperson <beppe@netscape.com>

    Highlights:

    • The team continues to focus on nsbeta2+, regressions and dogfood bugs in M16
    • Akkana resolved much of the paragraph and line selection issues
    • Kin resolved the d&d issue with selection
    • Simon pulled the Mac builds out of the blackhole on Wednesday
    • Mike is continuing his efforts with ender lite
    • Joe resolved a bunch of caret issues
    • Kathy is closer to being complete with d&d
    • Charley is 'this close' to being done with tables!
    • 43 editor bugs were resolved this past week, of those 9 were marked nsbeta2+
    • 24 open M16 bugs

    Lowlights:

    • We were plagued with problems last week: blockers, closed tree, folks out sick and some of the feature work has not yet been checked in
    • There are currently 304 open Composer bugs (M16-M30)

    Priorities for M16:

    • Kin:
      • 39821 -- d&d interferes with selection
      • assist mjudge with ender lite issues as they surface
      • assist in m16 triage
    • Kathy:
      •   6255 -- drag-n-drop
      • 17502 -- implement 'Recent Files'
      • 14874 -- Each edit control needs a context menu
      • 39308 -- Context menu items are not functional
      • wrap up tooltips text strings
    • Joe:
      • 14753 -- implement DL, DT & DD
      • 29843 -- caret display
      • 36679 -- changing the font size alters the font face
      • 39542 -- caret gets 'lost' when backspace past first character
      • 39864 -- selecting shft+enter and reposition caret causes js error
    • Simon:
      • 26447 -- implement updating of Paragraph and Font face menulists and handle "mixed" selection
      • 32540 -- Netscape 6 on Mac should have a new creator code.
    • Mike:
      • 4302 -- pg-up/pg-dwn does not move caret
      • 22751 -- can't select table data only
      • 34896 -- text widgets should use anonymous content
      • 35899 -- page scrolls on selecting text in position:relative div
      • 39528 -- nsDOMSelection::ToString with OutputSelectionOnly is busted
      • 39851 -- Clicking in an Ender-Lite textfield in composer crashes
    • Charley:
      • 20973 -- implement remainder of table editing -- dialog box work
      • 26833 -- implement row and column selection using mouse -- minor check in needed
      • 34519 -- implement property dialog popup when double click on element
      • 38875 -- Disable toolbar and menu items while in HTML Source edit mode
    • Akkana:
      • 16311 -- line selection
      • 32807 -- paragraph selection
      • 37950 -- edit fields eat context clicks
      • assist with ender lite as needed

    Accomplishments:

    • Kin
      • checked in d&d selection friendly code, ifdef'd out because there is a problem with textfield selection (39821)
      • helped mjudge with Linux makefiles for Ender-Lite support.
      • tracked down cause of bug #39567 (Can't type in textfields after tooltip/popup) then handed it off to pink
      • triaged and did preliminary debugging for various bugs.
      • tinderbox Sheriff duty on Thursday night/Early Friday morning.
    • Kathy
      • continued work on d&d; currently blocked by problems of selection and d&d interfering with each other (bug #39821)
      • fixed the current namespace issues within mozilla/editor for jst.
      • fixed d&d bug by adding flavors which are acceptable to editor.
      • fixed some Mac build bustage Wednesday morning.
    • Joe
      • spent some time grok'ing simon's command updating code
      • fixed some deletion problems, including bug 35942: caret gets lost when backspacing past front of doc
    • Simon
      • stayed up until 4am on Wed, fixing the Mac build to do the right thing with timers after pavlov checked in some code to remove linkage with the timer library. Also fixed a fallout bug in nsDocShell that was causing crashes on loading some pages.
      • fixed a crash on startup in nsInternetSearchService (some bad string code).
      • fixed an assertion on quit (an errant static nsCOMPtr<nsIAtom>).
      • checked in code to allow for progress messages in the splash screen on Mac (35866)
      • cleaned up apprunner's main(), and nsIStringStream.cpp
      • checked in code written with hyatt to make XBL work for HTML elements (for potential use in editing pages with forms in composer).
      • played with an ENDER_LITE build on Mac, and helped mjudge debug some reflow problems.
      • worked in implementing updating of the paragraph and font menutlists (26447).
      • various minor build and warning fixes.
      • sheriffed for some of Thursday
    • Mike
      • ender lite work -- hit several selection issues
      • fixed 38393 -- drop down menu selections bleeds into surrounding text
      • triaged several other bugs
    • Charley
      • all core work on 20973 is complete (table editing, mostly Join Cells and Split Cell.
      • table selection: ( 26833 ), core logic for selecting rows and columns is checked in.
      • helped Mike solve the "select Named Anchor icon" problem. We figured out how to use CSS background image instead of generated content ("before" attribute) and show the blue selection border around the icon when it is clicked on.
      • worked with Beth to finish "Show All Tags" editmode -- new icons for the tags.
      • cleaned up startup code shared between all editors -- all should now call EditorSharedStartup() [in editor.js].
    • Akkana
      • 6276: Added a menu for "rewrap selection" in mail compose, for J-F Ducarroz.
      • checked in my partial work (mostly code documentation/reorganization) for word/line/paragraph selection, bugs 16311, 32087, 16352.
      • made -- enable-ender-lite flag for the Unix build, to make it easy to help with Mike's ender lite work. Built and tested Ender Lite on linux.
      • reviewed and checked in a contribution from Daniel Bratell <bratell@lysator.liu.se> to fix bug 35118.
      • investigated bug 39508 (currently marked dogfood, not yet reviewed by PDT), found the problem and am partway toward a fix.
      • helped Mike get ender lite output to wrap properly.
      • helped Beth and RickG investigate bug 39799.  Looks like it's probably a parser (html content sink) bug.
      • triaged my M17 bug list, moved off some bugs, bumped up priorities of a few others that I thought should stay in M17 with appropriate commentary.

    Issues:

    • We need more time to finish the feature work so we can provide our users with a useable editor

    People:

    • Akkana was off on Friday and this Monday
    • Simon was off on Friday
    • Joe was out 3 days with the sore throat bug that is going around.
    Mail/News
    May 22
    Submitted by Steve Elmer <selmer@netscape.com>
    Thanks! to:
    • Suresh Kasinathan contributed by fixing 12 mail preferences bugs.
    • Rich for volunteering to take on Search BE.
    Issues
    • Vacations & Sabbaticals!
      • Ducarroz 5/22-6/9
      • Selmer 6/1-7/17
      • JeffT 7/10-9/5
      • SSpitzer 7/17-8/26
      • CHuang 7/24-8/11
      • RHP 8/18-8/27
    • Lengthy tree closures significantly hurting productivity
    • Having trouble getting stable Mac builds.
    • Debugging build tree regressions in general continue to consume a lot of our time
    • Netcenter ownership of activation services is in question, no commitments from them for beta2
    • Netcenter Webmail QA hopefully begins this week.
    • AOL mail server wierdness prevents turning on AOL psuedo mailbox view
    • Account Wizard skinnability depends on Ben's wizard work
    MailNews
    • Beta2 Feature List
    • Bugs closed last week
    • Check it out...
      • View | Messages | Unread works in flat view
      • Address Book Sync button hooked up
      • Multiple SMTP servers
      • Filter Editing complete
      • Subscribe is I18N friendly
      • View All Headers + Headers Popup
      • Charset override for message display
      • MScott & JeffT Attending Mail Connect next week
    • Estimated Days to nsBeta2+ Completion
      •  
        Rich15 (Search BE exception feature)
        Seth10+
        ScottiP15
        MScott20 + ~5 for exception features
        Jean-FrancoisN/A, on vacation to 6/11
        BienvenuN/A, on sick leave until further notice
        Candice8
        Jeff15
        Alec7
        Gayatri5
    Profile Manager
    • Estimated Days to nsBeta2+ Completion
      • Bhuvan 4
    • Last Week
      • Activation
    • This Week
      • bug cleanup


    CCK

    • Estimated Days to nsBeta2+ Completion
      • Varada 0
    • Last week
      • Finished all planned features except dependencies
    • This week
      • bug cleanup
    Architecture
    May 01
    Submitted by Warren Harris <warren@netscape.com>

    Highlights/FAQ/Kickoff/What we did last week

    • This is the first status report for our newly formed group, complete with fancy heading in safety yellow.
    • I hope the name I chose for this group ("The Architecture Group") isn't offensive to anyone since we're all doing architecture work in one form or another. We sat down to work out exactly what we were going to tackle together, and what we came up with is this:
      1. work on footprint and performance issues, coordinating efforts of internal and external contributers
      2. work on API design review and cleanup so that we can freeze some initial set of APIs that allows some set of customers to build on a stable platform
      3. work on a few special areas to ensure our future viability: xpcom/xpidl versioning (rayw, waldemar), and distributed application architecture (vidur)
      4. play traffic cop / sanity checker for our continuing effort to build a platform out of mozilla: untangling module dependencies, continuing to define and bless APIs, building a generic "apprunner" (the xul/css/xml/rdf/html/js version of tck/tk, so to speak)
    • The group has a very strange organization indeed, consisting of a number of official members (vidur, rpotts, jband, rayw, waterson and waldemar), and a number of extended members (including brendan, scc, sfraser, hyatt and others) who will help us get things done in mozilla.org and their specific areas. To top it off, some of the official members will be dedicated to specific areas, e.g. waterson will be filling the chevalier endowed chair in layout, rpotts will be filling a seat in the new embedding group run by Jud.
    • Our meetings will be Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3:00 in Knotts Landing (1st floor, bld 21). Tuesdays will focus on footprint/performance, Thursdays will focus on APIs. If anyone out there would like to phone, video-conference or physically drop in, please let me know (warren@netscape.com).
    • We will use the porkjockeys@mozilla.org for technical communication, whstaff@netscape.com for administrivia.
    • We met last Tuesday to come up with the groups objectives (above), and also last Thursday to review the Plugin API. Proposed changes to the Plugin API were made (by me) but the post on this never seemed to make it through the npm.porkjockeys gateway. I'll resend.
    • Vidur sent around a white paper on his ideas on "web applications." I'll ask him to repost to npm.porkjockeys.
    Engineering Status
    • waterson
    • vidur
      • Just got back from sabbatical. Getting re-oriented.
      • Started reading/writing on distributed application issues. Made contact with Netcenter/AOL content folks who might be involved. Will probably set up a mozilla newgroup in the next week or so.
      • Attended first API review meeting. Will continue to stay involved, possibly taking on some or all of the administrative responsibility.
      • Continued support of DOM feature/bug work. I'm trying to stay away from owning bugs, but I've been helping jst@netscape.com out with implementation ideas and bug investigation.
    • rayw
      • Monday and part of Tuesday I worked on completing the loose ends of the three bugs I had left.  I completed two, and discovered that my solution on three was really the wrong idea.  I did more work on it, but did not try to push it through for M16.  I will have it ready for M17.  I spent the intervening days:
      • DOM email and WG phone call.
      • Contributing to the ongoing raging controversy of Tim Berners Lee who wants to retroactively rewrite the specs (the majority opinion, or at least mine) such that relative names may be used as namespace names and need to be fixed up.
      • Debugging network issues to get a DSL link up that works well (the hub was trying to work at 100MBS, whereas the Cisco 675 was limited to 10 MBS, I think was the main problem.
      • Debugging the sera link, getting behind on all my email.
      • Catching up on email.
      • The rest of today and next week, with networking issues resolved, I need to catch up on the W3C spec I need to write, and the version control of xpcom interfaces and related issues.  I ought to also finish creating a fix for the M17 issue of nsSupportsHashtable, as we discussed, too.
    • waldemar
      • Investigated and presented the space of alternatives for versioning
      • XPCOM interfaces.
      • Worked on statement parser implementation for JavaScript 2.0.
      • Next week:
        • Continue work on JavaScript 2.0 parser.
        • Begin preparations for next ECMA meeting.
    • jband
      • On sabbatical.
    • warren
      • Planning meetings, writing up results and status reports.
      • Rewrote the Plugin API in xpidl, cleaning up things discussed in Thursday's meeting.
    • rpotts
      • no status

      •  

         

    Necko/Imglib
    May 22
    Submitted by Gagan Saksena <gagan@netscape.com>

    Summary

    • Highlight- First status report from the newly shaped group (Welcome Pam and Neeti) We may collectively be reached at gteam@netscape.com.
    • Lowlight- David's leaving :-(
    • Issues/Escalations- SSL on Mac!

    Detailed Status

    Highlights

    • gordon
      • worked on async DNS daemon for Unix.
        • looked at jwz's old code, as per Fred Roeber's suggestion.  It looks like Carl (Intel) based his daemon code on the old code.
          • some of the issues that faced jwz are no longer relevant, so I've concentrated on integrating Carl's code since it is closer to the form we want (separate daemon vs. forking mozilla early).
        • discovered PR_GetInheritedFD() doesn't support pipes.  Created fix and had Wan-Teh review it. see bug 39731.
        • it needs to be invoked from mozilla, and the nsDNSService needs to call it to resolve lookups.
          • still working on this (Saturday)
    • ruslan
      • 22103 (I can apply a patch along the lince Jud's suggested, though I'm not sure we want to do this; this is nsbeta2+ for some reason and we need a decision here what to do; it doesn't block anything as it's incorrectly stated before)
      • 39107 (still under investigation - looping redirect; easy fix is possible, but then we will not be able to detect redirect loops)
      • 33824 (file xfer op slowness has nothing to do with necko it turns to be; there's a bogus Cancellation coming back from webshell all the time which causes slowness)
      • 18886 (305 responces being ignore  - the fix is in)
      • 38423 (as we've settled on a work around I've checked in - this is closed now)
      • 38853 (checked in)
      • 27339 (worksforme, apparently because the final listener takes care of multiple onstops now)
      • 34743 (looks like a parser/string conversion bug - single-character forms variable are prepended with '.' or garbage; -> webshell)
      • Started to look into Necko2.0 issued; clean sync/async implementations of protocol handler, starting with http. A number of problems are being identified:
        • Available () method on Streams doesn''t make sense unless the stream is buffered and no further processing is applied so the length is known in advance. We need to teach applications not to rely on it. Instead we need to introduce a notion of blocking and non-blocking streams, where Read () will either block or succeed.
        • OnDataAvailable (with length) needs to go away and be replaced with just OnSomeDataAvailableMayBe (); the application should use Read () to actually determine how many bytes are available; this will allow us to avoid multi-layer memory/cpu consuming buffering on any intermediate layer
        • StreamConverters need to get changed to implement nsIInputStream interface, so they can be used consistentnly in both - sync and sync variants without performance/memory penalties.
    • neeti
      • bug 2828 -  netscape.cfg not available to SeaMonkey
      • bug 5132 - Apprunner must read netscape.cfg on startup. Checked in fix for optimized builds (non mac).This feature is currently disabled in the builds,    since I could not checkin netscape.cfg due to cvs problems.
      • talked to David and got a brain dump from him about the cache.
    • pnunn
      • bug#39086:  fixed/closed - add ART jgpd500.dll to packager on ns  packages-win.
      • bug#31228: fixed/closed-  (patch) nb init to zero.
      • bug#6074: fixed/closed. changes for #37909 fixed this bug as well.
      • bug#33810: fixed/closed. (dogfood/nsbeta2)  r:sfraser animation frame control from nsPresContext.
      • reassign to Gagan - bug 29219, 30267
    • andreas
      • [39340 regression: file:/ URLs no longer work] have fix, waiting for review and nomination
    • tever
      • General.
        • completed beta2 status report
        • verified approximately 15 bugs
        • installed vc++ and worked on setting up for building and modifying test programs
        • meetings attended - One on one, Browser QA, Seamonkey all hands, Necko brown bag seminar
        • working through old URL parsing bugs and adding test cases to urltest program, approx 40 so far
      • Reviews and Updates
      • Testcase Development, Reviews and Updates
      • Testing Conducted
        • testing m16 builds, focusing on cache, ftp and proxy this week
      • New Bugs Found (5)
        • 39672 - Disk cache not clearing from preferences.
        • 39779 - Proxy port # not saved to prefs.js from preferences dialog
        • 39785 - Some ftp folders are displaying document icon
        • 39801 - Pressing back button after ftp download displays download dialog
        • 39814 - ftp 'file unavailable' not handled for bad symbolic link
      • Hot Bugs
      • Project Related Issues/Concerns/Successes
      • Plans for Next Week
        • continue adding test cases for automated testing of HTTP
        • continue to add to list of url parser test cases, contacting Andreas for input
        • finish setting up machine for building
    • gagan
      • trying to survive it all.

    Lowlights

    • ruslan
      • OnStart/OnStop needs to still get straightened out
      • Shift-Reload needs to get hooked up to unblock a couple of nsbeta2 bugs

    Issues/Escalations

    • gordon (what I'm working on)
      • bug 10733 "sched - async dns unix"
      • bug 30917 "implement DNS caching and request cancelation"
        • need to analyze timing to see if a cache is really needed.
        • need to add platform specific cancellation calls
    Tru64
    May 25
    Submitted by James Nance <jnance@nortelnetworks.com>
    • The new string code makes heavy use of templates, and this caused symbol resolution problems. This was fixed by adding the -tlocal flag to the cxx compiler which causes templates to be instantiated as static functions in each source file that references them. This makes things work, but it has the potential to bloat the code. I have also gotten things to build using a global template repository, but I need a little autoconf help before I can check that in. Using the global repository results in a 5% decrease in the total size of the text segments of the shared libraries.
    • The new timer code did not work under Tru64, which caused a crash in the bookmark code. This works now.
    • The ATOM tools Third Degree and Hiprof are working well. I was going to profile the scrolling code, but Shaver has speed it up so much that I need to find something else to profile now :-)
    • I do not have good access to Tru64 systems that I can run X on right now. I could really use an account on a 4.0F or 5.0 system that can run X (I am using the testdrive machines at compaq, and they dont do X). Let me know if you can help me out.
    • There is now a Tru64 FAQ at http://www.mozilla.org/unix/tru64.html which should help people trying to build under Tru64 for the first time.

     

    Previous Updates