Phoenix

Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler, has posted the mozilla.org stance regarding Phoenix.

David Hyatt has written up a document describing how to adapt mozilla extensions for phoenix.

The 0.3 release, scheduled for October 8th, has been delayed for a week to give the developers more time to implement the features they want for that release. This also allows time for the mozilla tree to settle down from the code rush for 1.2beta.

The mozillazine Phoenix forums have been split up into general, skins, addons, and features.

In addition to the usual UI fixes/tweaks during the past week, the following features appear to have been checked in: favicon, popup whitelist, image blocking, and page report. Grab a nightly build, give it a spin, file bugs if appropriate.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird, formerly the Minotaur project, has been revived by Blake Ross. This will be a standalone mail-only application to accompany Phoenix (though obviously not required). Blake gives some more details in this post to the Phoenix forums. Version 0.1 is expected about the time of Phoenix 0.5.

Palm HotSync

Palm HotSync work has been checked in, not yet in the default build (bug 155417). Reading through the bugs, it appears to be currently a win32-only feature depending on the Palm HotSync Manager. The developers would welcome assistance getting this feature working on other platforms.

Mailnews

Two highlights:

• Can now customize some buttons on the 3pane and standalone window toolbars.
• Fixed focus issues when clearing Quick Search.

Spam/junk mail filtering

Making good progress on the bayesian junk mail filter, estimated ready by 1.2final (beard, bienvenu, dmose, sspitzer, peterv). (bug 169638)

XML prettyprinting

Code to display XML in a more friendly manner when no stylesheet is linked has been checked in (bug 64945). This feature isn't currently on by default, but you can experiment by placing the following line in your prefs.js:

user_pref("layout.xml.prettyprint", true);

Xft/fontconfig support

Reviews are proceeding - have patience. (bug 126919)

GTK2

Progress can be followed by watching bug 92033. Most of the big issues have been addressed; the last two big items are xft support (patch under review) and gtk2 embedding (which blizzard will turn his attention to after finishing xft).

Tree lockdown

The mozilla tree has been frozen in preparation for the 1.2beta release. Progress towards this release can be seen by watching the dependency list of the "make Mozilla 1.2beta not suck" bug. Do not modify the dependencies unless you're a driver, and if you nominate a bug for the list make sure you justify why it's important enough to delay the release.

After 1.2beta has been released the tree will remain frozen until 1.2. More details can be found on the roadmap.

The tree being frozen means that in addition to the usual review/super-review you also need driver approval before checking in. Here's what you need do to get driver approval:

1. Get your patch reviewed and super-reviewed
2. Tidy the bug patch history - if there are old patches in the bug, make sure they're marked obsolete
3. Mail drivers@mozilla with a message that includes the following information:
   • subject of the message should start "[trunk approval]"
   • bug number
   • description of the bug, visibility, why it's important, etc.
   • risk assessment of the bug, what testing has been done, possible failure modes if the patch doesn't work correctly
   • who gave the r/sr
   • a link to the bugzilla bug (never include the bugzilla page as an attachment)
4. Be patient as you wait for a response. Work on another bug, mediatate, play golf, watch a sunset, stick your head in a bucket of water -- whatever works for you. Remember that there are people all over the world in the same situation; drivers hasn't singled you out for torture.

Venkman documentation

The first part of a series of articles describing Venkman, the mozilla JavaScript debugger, has been posted to devedge.

Independent project status updates

The latest collection of independent (mozdev) status reports covers Securita, uabar, Mycroft, and Dafaty.