status update

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

Last Updated Friday July 21, 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


Friends of the Tree

Module Updates
NSS
July 14
Submitted by Wan-Teh Chang <wtc@netscape.com>

We made good progress towards NSS 3.1

  • We started work on the CA cert code.
  • We chose the MPI library authored by Michael J. Fromberger as the foundation of our BigNum package. Thanks to Mr. Fromberger for contributing his code to NSS.
  • We finished the coding of ArcFour and PRNG. We are incorporating suggested changes from code review.

Issues

XPToolkit
July 17
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>

(written with NS6, as is evident from the bizarre HTML) (ed. note: cleaned up in the mozilla.org status report)

Summary

  • The XPToolkit team resolved 37 bugs in the last week, fixing 24 of these, including 14 '+'. For details, see our resolved bug list.

Dogfood

  • None

Beta Stoppers

  • 37477 pavlov Browser crashes on this page (uses flash)
  • 39633 bryner Quit from browser or composer doesn't prompt to save Compose
  • 39655 garyf Switch folder after resize msg pane hides header envelope un
  • 42451 evaughan Loading page with lots of form elements is very slow
  • 45248 hyatt profile mgr crashes if you use <ret> key to pick profile
  • 45358 hyatt Intermittent crash on startup
  • 45439 pavlov <reviewed fix in hand> Crash when dbl click in urlbar; clipboard problemF

Highlights

  • Mike Pinkerton (pinkertoni)
    • Has been rewriting chunks of GFX with Simon to try to fix drawing MacOS drawing problems (42289)
  • Chris Saari (saari)
    • Helped akkana, smfr work on nsbeta2+ bugs, and helped with problems in and the mac classic skin.
  • Eric Vaughan (evaughan)
    • Fixed native widget bug in ender lites scroll port
    • Removed native scrollbar option from preference
  • Stuart Parmenter (pavlov)
    • Fixed linux plugins bug 37477... except when they arn't used in an embed or object tag and you load them directly... so i've reopened and i'm working on it. Fixed secure (ssl) imap and news (bug 39154)
  • David Hyatt (hyatt)
    • Fixed numerous tree widget nsbeta2+ and dogfood bugs
    • Helped out with ender lite performance issues
  • Brian Ryner (bryner)
    • worked on tree bugs - 43459, 44859, and tried to help hyatt with scrolling/reflow issues.

Lowlights

Priorities

  • pinkerton
    • 42289 Blank windows/popups on Mac
  • saari
  • hyatt
    • 45248 profile mgr crashes if you use <ret> key to pick profile
    • 45358 Intermittent crash on startup腷
  • evaughan
    • 42451 Loading page with lots of form elements is very slow
    • Box documentation
  • pavlov
    • finish plugin bug 37477
  • danm
  • garyf
    • 39655 Switch folder after resize msg pane hides header envelope un
  • bryner
    • 39633 Quit from browser or composer doesn't prompt to save Compose

Issues

  • Poor performance is a more serious defect than many that we are fixing, and is growing worse.

Escalation

People

  • Evaughan will be on vacation for a month starting 7/22.
  • GaryF was out last week.
Composer
July 17
Submitted by Beth Epperson <beppe@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • beginning the UI review process for RTM
  • beginning to plan for the next release
  • 37 bugs resolved this past week (fixed, duped, worksforme, invalid
  • Akkana resolved the onFocus/onBlur bug and worked with Saari quite a bit this week to resolve several focus and key event issues
  • Anthony working with jst on a DOM bug and fixed a couple nsbeta2+ bugs
  • Charley wrapped up most of the remaining table dialog issues
  • Joe fixed a nasty IME bug
  • Kathy found a nasty bug when you empty disk cache; various directories on your hard drive are deleted (without warning, etc.)
  • Kin helped resolve the problem with images not rendering correctly and with the issue that images could not be inserted correctly.
  • Mike has been working with layout to help resolve some major incremental overflow problems
  • Simon worked on some real nasty issues this week -- paste problems, the problem with changing skins locks up Composer and worked on Mac related issues

Lowlights

  • downgraded a mess of nsbeta2+ bugs
  • application spec is still not complete, working on it this week and next

Dogfood

  • no dogfood bugs currently assigned to Editor team

Risk

  • no risks at this time in regards to solving the open nsbeta2+ bugs

Features

  • no feature work at this time

NsBeta2+ Stoppers

  • Akkana
    • 42885 -- Paste action fails when the selection was cut|copied from HTML
  • Anthony
    • 43967 -- Return key ignored in all text fields with DOM2 namespace changes on
  • Charley
    • none
  • Joe
    • 33213 -- HTML from Seamonkey email not displayed correctly in Netscape 4.x
  • Kathy
    • 45390 -- <TEXTAREA> Back/Forward Arrow keyboard buttons jump 2 characters
  • Kin
    • 42263 -- [Regression]Unable to invoke IME in the recipient and subject fields
  • Mike
    • 43992 -- Collapse the addr block in msg compose loses recipients
  • Simon
    • 44621 -- Crash on shutdown, mac-only
    • 43350 -- Changing to a modern theme and then trying to type in the body doesn't work

Issues

  • It would be prudent if teams had more control on what gets checked in and what gets bumped. Since the engineers and their managers are closer to the issues, we more fully understand the impact of the bug and the fix. I'm quite confused at to what the role of the PM, the manager and the engineer are anymore. I can understand why the PDT team gets involved in situations when asked for advice, but not with the everyday decisions. It's frustrating to be micro managed at this level and to see bugs that really need to get fixed, bumped off the list. I truly understand the need to be prudent, but there is a point when you actually have to ask if the application will result in a good experience for the user -- and that includes usability -- not just does it crash or lose data

People

  • Kathy will be on sabbatical starting 8/17
  • Charley starts vacation on 7/12, returning 7/31

Accomplishments

  • Akkana
    • Finished and checked in the fix for 38232 (nsbeta2+), the problem with onFocus/onBlur not working because of platform newline issues, thanks to a lot of help from Kin.
    • Worked on bug 43388, InsertAsQuotation not flowed aware, until it was pulled off the nsbeta2+ list.
    • Spent the rest of the week working with Saari on focus and key event issues:
      1. Helped with tracking down smoketest blocker bug/regression 35952, spacebar scrolls page while typing in text field.
      2. Found an initial fix for bug 42885 (nsbeta2+), key bindings for cut/copy/paste not working right in textareas (and, it turns out, not right in the editor either, in many cases). Turns out that there is lots of confusion in the current key binding setup, and the key binding files need to be cleaned up (I had to make fixes in lots of different places), so I've checked in the band-aid part of the fix for now.
      3. Discovered that this fix also fixed the long-standing and ugly bug 31233, on XBL key bindings not working in dialogs, and closed out that bug.
    • Taking Friday off (flying to Denver to visit David's family).
  • Anthony
    • fixed 39919 (nsbeta2+)
    • fixed 45477
    • Friday off
    • Met with Johnny Stenback (jst) to discuss the DOM2 level model, and why using the URI to look up HTML elements is bad.
    • Quantify runs on editor, layout, and viewer.
  • Charley
    • fixed the table background image not working
    • wrapped up the remainder of the table properties dialog problems
    • worked out a resolution to the toolbars issue when in HTML Source mode
    • fixed an open dialog problem
  • Joe
    • fixed sick and twisted IME bug (43366) that Erik van der Poel told me about.
    • fixed a problem with making new, empty, block elements when selection was inside an inline node (43903).
    • fixed problem with signatures getting inserted in the wrong place in mail (36570).
    • worked with Ducarroz to fix a bad interaction between IME and autocomplete (42329); this gave me a reason to finally fix non-nsbeta2+ bug 35027: making an editor observer and changing the gfx text widget to use it instead of listening straight to the document. I had to do this work to fix 42329.
    • debated with Ben Bucksch about how much we should alter people's email by default. (This discussion is in netscape.public.mozilla.mail-news.)
    • code reviews for Charlie and Simon.
    • Sheriff'd for a day.
  • Kathy
    • Ate dogfood and filed bugs
    • Helped av out with a Mac bug with plugins (this really needs more cleanup but it's ok for nsbeta2 probably)
    • Helped Kin get his Mac hard drive reformatted and development tools installed/configured.
    • Found a particularly nasty bug when you empty disk cache (in advanced prefs); various directories on your hard drive are deleted (without warning, etc.)
    • Started working on a document for our next generation Composer and editing engine development work. Most of the bugs marked "Future" are included but I still want to scan the newsgroup and add some of those ideas too. This first draft will be a laundry list which we'll want to pare down and add more details.
    • Reviewed fixes for Kin.
    • Tracked down bug #45477 which anthonyd was kind enough to check in on his birthday. :-)
    • Fixed 43904 (print plus).
  • Kin
    • Helped cls@seawood.org track down Monday morning Win32 commercial build bustage.
    • Code reviewed and tested several revisions of akkana's fix for bug #38232.
    • Code reviewed some of sfraser's TextWidget enables Undo/Redo menu item changes.
    • Helped pnunn track down problem that was preventing images from displaying in the editor. Bug #40785 and #40767
    • Spent some time rewriting an editor IME helper method needed to help sun engineers fix nsbeta2+ bug #42263. Submitted patch for them to try out.
    • Got brief Mac build and debugging tutorial from brade and sfraser.
    • Had small discussion with mjudge and jfrancis regarding the problem where TextFields lose their value when their frames are destroyed. This happens during a toolbar collapse or print.
    • Triaged and did some preliminary debugging on various bugs.
    • Wrote some test cases and posted them in the bug reports to simplify debugging and testing.
    • Ate dogfood.
    • Checked in fix for bug #43208 (readonly text fields are not readonly)
    • Checked in fix for bug #45002 (Password text appears in clear). Fix involved using the editor to set the initial content, and preventing paint and reflow methods from being re-entered via the editor calls.
  • Mike
    • worked with layout team to help narrow down some major incremental overflow problems
    • worked with anthony to get better quantify reports to understand why the app is so slow
    • worked on trying to resolve the form text field performance issues
  • Simon
    • Fixed nsbeta2+ bug 31134 (Paste not updated correctly), and, in the process, bugs 45161 and 45139. Updating the Paste menu item at the correct time is hard, especially as there is no single place in the code that is called once on window activation. Worked with saari to find a reasonable compromise.
    • Spent time working with pinkerton on bug 42289 (bad drawing on Mac); we now understand the problem better, but don't have a fix yet.
    • Talked to hyatt about the chrome switching bug 43350, which is hard to fix. Came to the conclusion that closing all windows is the best workaround for beta2.
    • Tested some PLEvent handling changes for dougt.
    • Worked with beard on some SSL problems on Mac
    • Caught up with mail after vacation
Architecture
July 17
Submitted by Warren Harris <warren@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • Edward Kandrot has accepted a position in our group to do footprint and performance work full-time. He starts 7/31.

Lowlights

  • The API Review meeting from this week was postponed due to key people visiting Dulles.

Engineering Status

  • waterson
    • nsTextRun-ectomy complete (well, the patches are anyway: see bug 19051). Removed what appeared to be a premature optimization from layout, nsTextRun. This datastructure "flattened" all of the text within a block frame, with the intention of making it easy for the line- and word-breaking code to "pull up" contiguous text that appeared across separate frames (e.g., <b>N</b>etscape). Turns out that we spent way more time updating this structure than using it, so I got rid of it, and crawl the frame tree "by hand" to find the next text. Net result: speeds up LXR-like pages by up to 30%! (Long, flat HTML.) I'll check this in for Beta3
    • Did some ender profiling to help with bug 42451. Discovered that we were creating a heavy-weight widget for each frame. evaughan fixed that. Discovered that we were slamming XBL for each one (creating 26 XBL object per frame). hyatt deduced that these were scrollbars, which we never show. evaughan is fixing that.
    • Spent some time reconstructing how 4.x handled <embed hidden="true"> for bug 37622. Worked up a patch; still need to verify that it works on Mac, and need to incorporate feedback from pav & blizzard on Linux. Should check it in this weekend.
    • rjc has taken over responsibilities for global history and FTP/file viewing!
  • vidur
    • Completed first pass implementation of a non-proxying SOAP calling component. It's now part of the XML Extras module. The code can be found in extensions/xmlextras/soap and a JS example can be found in extensions/xmlextras/test.
    • Started writing a document on the application manifest idea that I hinted at in the "Web Applications" document that I posted to the n.p.m.xml newsgroup a while ago.
  • rayw
    • Revamping the following APIs for embedding: nsIComponentManager, nsIModule nsIComponentLoader, nsIServiceManager and reimplementing these parts where necessary and dropping nsICategoryManager.
    • Revamping the initialization / shutdown of XPCOM itself, so that it is recursive and restartable.
    • Spent much of my time doing style coordination, working on the DOM views and formatting model. Hopefully I will soon reach a point in the DOM views and formatting proposal where I can insist that others take over some of this burden.
    • Working with Vidur on general problems such as Web Applications.
    • Weeding out bug reports, and reconfiguring machines so that they work.
  • waldemar
    • Away at ECMA meeting at Microsoft PDC, Orlando, FL.
  • rpotts
    • Spent Mon-Wed at AOL. (Marathon meetings :-)
    • Started looking at intra-page bloat for the embedded Gecko. Since the bloat between SeaMonkey and embedded Gecko are substantially different (ie. very little chrome and XUL) I thought that it would be valuable to spend a bit of time trying to characterize the bloat seen in "typical usage scenarios" for the embedded gecko.
    • Discovered major bugs and bloat in the tokenizer which result in tokens never being freed.
  • jband
    • no status
  • warren
    • Changed RDF APIs to eliminate unnecessary creation of "arcs" enumerators. Spead up mail/news folder loading by 25%! The mailnews guys are afraid to check it in though before beta2.
    • Working with dprice on jar file packaging.
    • Working on removing string-bundles from necko in favor of a strategy that requires callers to deal with error messages and string-bundles. Hope to get this in in the next few days.
  • dprice
    • Working on jar file packaging. We've gotten past numerous assertions and are now able to load chatzilla from jar files. Started converting other packages to use jar manifests.
Necko/Imglib
July 17
Submitted by Gagan Saksena <gagan@netscape.com>

Summary

  • nsbeta2+ going down steadily.
  • sadly some of them are just being pushed off for now (i.e. they will come back to haunt us for nsbeta3)
  • gordon gets back this week.

Dogfood and Risks

  • None

Beta Stoppers

  • 10 left. (gagan-3, neeti-3, pnunn-2, ruslan-2)

Highlights

  • neeti
    • Fixed dogfood+ bug 40449-Cache does not store latest value of pages.
    • Currently working on 40084
  • pnunn
    • bug#40785: pasting images in editor. due to no_anim flag triggering error. rev:kin.
    • bug #40767: fix for #40785 also fixes this one.
    • bug#43943: reassigned to dcone. sounds like a tiling issue.
    • bug#40426: added explanitory comment for bug closure as wontfix.
    • bugscape #1043: the art library was not going into the Essential Files directory on the mac.fix needed in CommercialBuildList.pm. r: jj
    • bug#44368: (nsbeta2+) added a patch to bypass crash for display screen depth >24. Asked Mike if this would fix crash until the bug can be properly addressed. Not checked in, want a review from Mike (reporter)
    • In progress- .bug#30852: (nsbeta2+): image reloading. This bug seems to have 4 or 5 pieces that need fixing. I'm working with/talking to Neeti and Rick Potts. I don't seem to be getting the correct netlib load attributes for pragma-nocache pages. Most of my changes break view-images. And I feel very very uncomfortable checking something in that breaks view-images.
  • ruslan
    • Bugs resolved: 44138,44562,42355,42537,14772,41538,45061,45398
    • We are in reasonably good shape
  • gagan
    • Bugs resolved: 39610, 33275, 41433
    • Triaging individual bugs with the whole team for us to glide in smoothly for nsbeta2.
  • andreas
    • resolved bug 43889 as invalid
    • resolved bug 44817 as worksforme
    • Fixed bug 42342 again.

Lowlights

  • ruslan
    • Jar protocol is still reported to be hanging sometimes.
  • gagan
    • Did some performance investigations on the weekend and noticed that WinEmbed (the cool sample embed-app that dougt wrote) is way faster than SeaMonkey. Filed the bug 45671

Issues/Escalations

  • None.
XML/DOM
July 17
Submitted by Nisheeth Ranjan <nisheeth@netscape.com>

Summary

  • We resolved 30 bugs last week (Bugzilla query).
  • We have no dogfood+ bugs and 1 nsbeta2+ bug.
  • This report was done in Netscape 6's Composer!

People

  • Nisheeth will attend a Management@AOL and Compensation@AOL day long class on Thursday, July 20th.
  • Harish will attend the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey on July 19th and 20th.
  • Nisheeth will attend the XML Query Face to Face meeting in Seattle on July 25th and 26th.
  • Tom is on sabbatical till August 25th.

Highlights

  • Harish Dhurvasula (harishd)
    • Fixed bugs 43499,44178,42525,7670,42429.
    • Unblocked FTang by fixing up ( in his local tree ) a bug in COtherDTD.
    • Triaged my bug list. NF=7 ( from 13),B3=38(from 35),F=21(from 20).
    • Triaged Rickg's bug list.
  • Heikki Toivonen (heikki)
    • Learning about DOM Events, going over joki's bugs. Found one that was already fixed (41164).
    • Working on a fix to 41599.
  • Johnny Stenback (jst)
  • Nisheeth Ranjan (nisheeth)
    • Implemented SetDOMDocument() on the document viewer to help Peter Van der Beken with integrating XSL into Mozilla.
    • Code reviewed submissions from Tom Lendacky, IBM who is implementing P3P in Mozilla. Jud, Tom, and I will meet sometime this week and figure out whether Tom is using the right interfaces for hooking into Mozilla.
    • Attended Jim Hamerly's staff meeting.
    • Conducted Clayton's staff meeting while he was away.
    • Chris Saari and I met with Heikki to give him an overview of the DOM events code and selected some bugs for him to attack.
    • Participated in the XML Query WG teleconference call (2 hours)
    • Caught up with the XML newsgroup. In the process of catching up with the DOM newsgroup.
    • Initiated contact with Mary Brade (NIST) to figure out how we can work together to ensure that the NIST DOM test suite works in Mozilla.
    • Met with Ray, Vidur, and Pierre to get a recap of the recent Hypertext Coordination group meeting.

Lowlights

  • None.

Dogfood

  • None.

Beta Stoppers

  • 1 nsbeta2+ bug down from 12 nsbeta2+ bugs last week
  • 43472 (Crash on exit in optimized full circle enabled builds) - This has proved to be a hard to reproduce bug - Eric Pollmann and I couldn't repoduce this on our Linux boxes and Mike Pinkerton couldn't reproduce it on his Mac. I have an optimized full circle enabled build with debug symbols on my Linux box. I'll work with Shiva to do the local magic necessary to set up talkback reporting in the build and will then run it on Akkana's box. If we can get it to crash there, we can, hopefully, make progress on this bug...

Features

  • None

Issues

  • None

Escalations

  • None
Mail/News
July 21
Submitted by Scott MacGregor <mscott@netscape.com>

No Dogfood Bugs.

We currently have 9 remaining nsbeta2+ bugs: 7 in bugzilla and 3 in bugscape. We are on target for being all wrapped up on 7/18.

We resolved as 35 fixed (24 nsbeta2+)

  • mscott fixed 7 nsbeta2+ bugs and 1 dogfood bug. Also spent most of the week working with Bill Law to finish implementing back end support for the helper app dialog. Pretended to be putterman who was pretending to be selmer for the two days that putterman was on vacation at the end of last week. Has one remaining nsbeta2+ bug. Expected D-Day 7/18.
  • putterman -- cotinued to sub for selmer. He's out on vacation this week.
  • dimator spent the week working on getting quantify running again on windows. He also fixed 3 nsbeta2+ bugs and debugged another one.
  • Bhuvan fixed 2 nsbeta2+ bugs related to profile migration. He currently has 3 remaining nsbeta2+ bugs (with a fix in hand for one of them). Expected D-Day: 7/18.
  • Candice fixed 3 nsbeta2+ bugs including the infamous Edit Mailing list doesn't display its entries! She currently has no more remaining nsbeta2+ bugs and is working on Bug #44831.
  • alecf fixed his last nsbeta2+ bug and is at zero. He also fixed a bug in the DNS service. He'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey this week about the mailnews open source project. Good luck Alec!
  • Verada fixed 3 mailnews beta2+ bugs and fixed the build scripts for CCK to get those going again. He has 2 remaining nsbeta2+ bugs. Expected D-Day: 7/18.
  • timeless --> submitted several patches for mailnews menus to alecf that went into the tree this week. Thanks timeless!
  • Jean-Francois worked with Joe Francis on his remaining nsbeta2+ bug: 42329. The fix is getting checked in today so he's now at zero.
  • Bienvenu fixed several nsbeta2+ bugs and has one left. Expected D-Day: 7/18.
  • RHP spent the week working on absynch. He has 3 remaining abysnch bugs we'd need to fix if we are going to turn absynch on for beta2.
  • gayatri was in Hawaii for the first half of the week. She came up with a fix for 43883 and is now working on her last nsbeta2+ bug: 43884. Expected D-Day: 7/18.
  • sspitzer --> on sabbatical.
  • jefft on sabbatical
LDAP
July 21
Submitted by Dan Mosedale <dmose@netscape.com>
The LDAP code is almost building on Windows; this will be checked in soon and announced in netscape.public.mozilla.directory when it's working.

Previous Updates