status update

maintained by Tim Rowley <tor@cs.brown.edu>

Last Updated Thursday November 29, 2001

This status update page is updated every week. 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
Roland Mainz
November 27
Submitted by Roland Mainz <Roland.Mainz@informatik.med.uni-giessen.de>

Highlights

  • landed the new print dialog for Unix, OS/S and BeOS (bug 84947 - We need a "better" print dialog...)
    • Many many thanks to:
      • Jessica Blanco (jblanco@us.ibm.com) and Michael Kaply (mkaply@us.ibm.com) who did do the main work (XUL/JS/DTD dialogs and OS/2 platform), Asko Tontti (atontti@cc.hut.fi) for fixing the XUL/JS stuff after blake's landing of bug 107642 ("Land giant xul patch"),
      • David Baron for fixing the BeOS platform after landing the patch (bug 111450 - it seems that I missed somehow that BeOS uses the PostScript module, too.. ;-( ), Kai Engert (kaie@netscape.com) for checking all the pieces "in" and many many others who helped with their comments/suggestions/reviews, too...
    • Short usage summary of new functionality: If you use Xprint or OS/2 then you'll get the list of available printers automagically, otherwise you have to fill the MOZILLA_PRINTER_LIST env var with the list of available printers (like % export MOZILLA_PRINTER_LIST="printer1 printer2 mycolorprinter1")
  • updated xlib widget and timer code (bug 111508 and bug 110643)
  • fixed "nebiros" tinderbox bustage caused due use of "" instead of <> for system headers (bug 111574)
  • worked on X font banning code (bug 104075) to work around the sideeffects of bug 94327(=which should give some improvements in font rendering on some X11 platforms)
  • worked on minor improvements (like bug 34242 and bug 110628)

Lowlights

  • nsHashTable code not working on 64bit platforms (bug 69815) which may be one of the reasons why "nebiros" tinderbox is still ORANGE

Plans for next week

  • filed bug 111934 ('We need a better "print job options" dialog...') as follow-up to bug 84947
  • going to implement MIT-SHM extension support for Xlib toolkit (bug 83355)
Mailnews
November 27
Submitted by Scott Putterman <scottip@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • Lots of performance work going on including a number of message display performance improvements.
  • Mork supports XPCOM. A number of Mork leak fixes were checked in.
  • Resolved as fixed 39 bugs

Performance and Footprint

  • Most of the mail team is now going to focus on performance in 0.9.7 and 0.9.8
  • Look here for the performance page.
  • Look here for current performance numbers.
  • General
    • Varada worked on doing automated timings for folder loading and message display.
  • Message Display
    • Work mentioned in last week's status report gave us a 10% improvement on the performance machine.
    • Scott improved message display by reducing our round trips between the JS thread and the UI thread for parsing email addresses.
    • Scott made messages with huge a number of recipients (600 or so) display just as fast as messages of the same size with a few recipients.
  • Compose Window
    • Jean-Francois fixed the double blinking cursor and disabled edit field bugs for the recycled compose window.
    • Jean-Francois is investigating a bug where the recycled compose windows sometimes pops up unexpectedly.
    • Jean-Francois is looking into some ways to improve the performance of sending large messages.
    • Varada continued to work on integrating the recycled compose window with turbo.
  • Address Book
    • Seth continued working on the AB_OUTLINER_BRANCH. See below for more details.
  • Footprint
    • David checked in Mork changes to support XPCOM, fixed memory leaks by using XPCOM ref-counting semantics, removed orkin layer, and unused sorting code. Changed lots of client code to use AddRef and Release and nsCOMPtrs with mork objects, and fixed some leaks in the address book code along the way.
    • David cut down a little bloat by removing unused member variables in nsMsgHdr.
    • David reduced memory allocations by avoiding an extra string copy when getting string data from mork, and caching folder character set.
    • David fixed a leak of the imap password, certain imap progress strings, i18n encoder and decoder for every mail/news message displayed, and identity objects when editing drafts.
    • Navin fixed a leaking url when copying messages from nntp to imap.
    • Navin fixed leaking filenames on loading and creating new local folders.
    • Navin fixed a few char* leaks while sending attachments.
    • Navin removed and cleaned up code in nsPop3Service::BuildPop3Url .

Mailnews Accomplishments

  • Seth
    • Got Address Book drag and drop working on the AB_OUTLINER_BRANCH
    • Helped fix a smoketest blocker where menus weren't doing anything on the Mac.
    • Fixed a regression where the offline indicator was broken in the compose window.
  • Navin
    • Fixed a crasher when reading news/imap messages from cache.
  • Sean
    • Finished the filters part of Labels.
    • Continued getting reviews for Labels.
  • Scott
    • Finished working on a smime UI for the message pane so we can get rid of those temporary Alerts. This isn't the final spec'ed UI but it implements the frame work we will use for the final UI and gets rid of the JS alert dialogs.
  • Bhuvan
    • Investigated some regressions.
    • Continued looking at Account Wizard rewrite to use </wizard>
  • Stephen Donner
    • Removed "Document: Done" from the status bar when opening a compose window.
  • Roland Mainz
    • Helped with some Tinderbox bustage.
Calendar
November 28
Submitted by Mike Potter <mikep@oeone.com>

One major item accomplished this week:

Thanks to Jake and John Gray in #calendar on irc.mozilla.org, the calendar is now running under Windows. John ported the libical code to Windows, and they both helped each other and others in building it this past week.

A requirements document for the calendar was posted to news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.calendar The feedback from this document is being consolidated into the first draft for the official requirements document. It should be complete this week. The document is available online at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Mostafa Hosseini at OEone worked on moving more of the calendar logic to the backend. This was completed for the OEone calendar. We will go through and test this code, and when we are satisfied that it works, we'll integrate these changes back into the Mozilla calendar. The logic for displaying events will now be calculated on the backend rather than in JS.

Previous Updates