status update

maintained by Chris Nelson <chrisn@statecollege.com>

Last Updated Sunday, April 25th, 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

A big friend of the tree is Bruce Mitchener Jr.

Bruce has been checking in build fixes, making the code more portable, and getting some neglected tests in the tree to build and work. See for yourself.

He's also been very vocal in the netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups and in #mozilla on IRC helping answer questions and lending his opinions. Bruce is the man.

-Seth Spitzer

Module Updates
XPToolkit
April 25
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • Thanks mostly to much needed volunteer help from Syd Logan, we got modal dialogs working on Linux. (syd, rods, mcafee)
Lowlights
Accomplishments
  1. Fixed 9 reported bugs (and some that weren't) in the last week, see our Fixed Bug List for details.
  2. Wrote and updated the Clipboard Design document. (rods)
  3. Completed most all D&D tasks for XP and Windows, plus Mac stubs, but with a few minor cleanups still left to do. (rods)
  4. nsCOMPtr'ed all the Clipboard and D&D code. (rods)
  5. Reworked all the key event handling code for Windows, it works much better now. (rods)
  6. Removed a lot of old code MailAppCore, D&D interfaces, etc. (rods)
  7.  Implemented window.open, window.close, and other window.xxx() functions. (hyatt)
  8. Fixed onload, onunload, onabort, and onerror so that they work properly.  Can't check in until M6 branch opens. (hyatt)
  9. Added support for event capture to the XUL document.  Can't check in until M6 branch opens. (hyatt)
  10. Added support for dynamic script addition of events to the XUL document and XUL nodes.  Can't check in until M6 branch opens. (hyatt)
  11. Implemented the framework for the tracking of multiple content webshells, so that a window.open can be made to open chrome (and to specify the URLs to fill the content areas with).  (hyatt)
  12. XUL from streams completed and checked in. (scc)
  13. Added slider, scrollbar, spinner, color and font picker stub implementations to build and hooked them up to be instantiated from XUL. (pinkerton)
  14. Completed a basic tab widget. (evaughan)
  15. Got clipboard working on Linux, plain-text only for now. (mcafee)
  16. Removed the old nsSelectionMgr interface for clipboard. (mcafee, pinkerton, rods)
Priorities
  1. Stop the WebShell from leaking. (scc, everyone else, maybe you too)
  2. Fix other M5 bugs (all)
  3. Make modal windows modal, from a UI perspective, on Win32. (danm)
  4. Drag & Drop on Mac & Linux. (pinkerton, mcafee)
  5. Do some Purify-cation on Solaris.
  6. Current XPToolkit implementation has problems with reliable, predictable  DOM node sharing  and persistance.  We need to add a XUL language feature for sharing, and a way to distinguish persistance too. This will require massive changes (~ 1 week) by Hyatt and Waterson, on a branch, early in M6.
Decisions
  1. At the request of XPApps and other clients, we won't be checking in accomplishment items (8), (9), and (10) above until immediately after the tree branches for M6, since doing so would break a number of dialogs in the product that have been built up around the nsIXULCallbacks structure, which needs to go away. They need more time to move their code to the new implementation.
  2. Steve Dagley will be taking over ownership of Mac NSPR issues, at least while Gordon Sheridan is working on Necko. (sdagley)
Issues
  • Making progress on window-related issues has been made more difficult due to some XPToolkit client implementations depending on hacks and/or implementing incorrect solutions to problems.  Before using anything that is not explicitly supported, or guessing at how something should be done, or if you're just not sure of the right way, please raise your questions and issues to our attention. We'd much rather help out up front than try to untangle layers of problems after the fact.
  • We need to get to the point where our dogfood is usable for at least some daily tasks, and using it for Bugzilla seems like a good minimum.  Let's make sure that we fix whatever bugs needed to do that in M5, and keep raising the bar from there.
  • Some embeddable components (Netlib, Gecko?) have dependencies on XPToolkit, which is not embeddable. We need to ensure that any such dependencies are isolated via interfaces that can be implemented by the embedding apps
NGLayout
April 23
Submitted by Troy Chevalier <troy@netscape.com>

Troy writes in with this update:

"We actually have some interesting status this week:

Kipp:

  • I landed css compliant implementation of :first-line support. We now support properly the allowed style properties including background properties. We also disable any disallowed style properties.
  • Various and sundry bug fixes including (to be landed today) image loading improvements that eliminate triple reflows (whoops!) and duplicate image loaders (an optimization) and extra reflows for fully constrained images (whoops!).
  • All M5 bugs are fixed.

Chris:

  • Tables - right-to-left directed tables.
  • Forms - rounded rectangles. initial support for gfx rendered combo boxes.

Troy:

  • working on fixed background support and making it so relatively positioned inline frames are containing blocks for absolutely positioned child elements "
RDF
April 23
Submitted by Robert Churchill <rjc@netscape.com>

Robert Churchill has this RDF update for us::

"The biggest thing on my side for RDF this week was a first cut at hooking up 'Related Links'. To see it in action, visit a URL, drag open the sidebar and then open the 'Related Links' container. A few caveats exist, including that "Related Links" preferences aren't yet being observered. "

ImgLib
April 23
Submitted by Pam Nunn <pnunn@netscape.com>

Here's the ImgLib update from Pam Nunn:

You've just designed the best new image format in the universe, but no one is using it but you?

Add your format to Gecko so that your fabulous images will display as natively supported image formats. No embed tag needed.

The XPCOMitized image library landed Thursday. This first cut of the new design means that adding new image decoders supporting inline images will be a breeze.

The directory structure under mozilla/modules/libimg has been modified. A directory for notes and documentation is in mozilla/modules/libimg/doc. I am working on a cookbook for adding new decoders.

A minor caution: These api's will be fine tuned in the next few weeks. Don't take the current code as the final gospel. If you write to this api, be willing to make some modifications to your component.

 

Grendel (Java Mail/News)
April 23
Submitted by Giao Nguyen <grail@cafebabe.org>

Giao has this Grendel update for us:

After weeks, I finally managed to get some code checked in. The API for multiple identity has been checked in. I'm going to try to hack out the preferences dialogs for the beast next week. The usage of multiple-identity has been supported thus far in the composition UI from Edwin's past work.

For simplicity, the keys have been changed from:

mail.identity-#.name=value

to:

mail.identity.name.#=value

The purpose was to make string contatentations simpler and reduce the usage of String objects. Hopefully this should also make the application marginally faster.

XML
April 23
Submitted by Nisheeth Ranjan <nisheeth@netscape.com>

Nisheeth has this week's XML update:

  • Expat's switch to handle unicode buffers was turned on this week. Windows and Mac are handling the change fine. Unix has a few bugs that are being investigated.
  • Thanks a lot to Tim Rowley tor@cs.brown.edu for submitting a patch that fixed expat build breakage on SGI boxes.
  • We are working with Catalin Rotaru (cata@netscape.com) of the Internationalization team to get support for loading up external DTDs into expat."

Webshell
April 23
Submitted by Nisheeth Ranjan <nisheeth@netscape.com>

Nisheeth also has this week's Webshell update:

  • Worked with Neeti (neeti@netscape.com) (PICS) and Frank Tang (ftang@netscape.com) ( I18N) to expose specific methods on a webshell proxy object needed by the PICS and I18N services for loading and displaying documents. "
Javascript
April 23
Submitted by Scott Furman <fur@netscape.com>

Scott writes:

"Chris Waterson has checked in code that uses xptcall, and we have other groups lined up to use it soon. We'll probably be pulling the switch to make it an essential part of the mozilla build in the next few weeks.  Hint: that means if xptcall is not ported to your platform, you will not be able to run Mozilla at all.

xptcall allows arbitrary XPCOM objects to be called dynamically, and is an essential part of the XPConnect layer that allows javascript to script arbitrary XPCOM objects.  So far we have code for Mac, Windows, Linux x86, FreeBSD/NetBSD x86, and Solaris, and we have candidates for Solaris x86 and OS/2. We still need porting help for other platforms.  So, if you're familiar with assembly, and you've been looking for a way to contribute to Mozilla, this is a great opportunity.  Porting xptcall is a self-contained problem with no dependencies on external code.   Please let us know if you can help!"

Mail/News
April 23
Submitted by Phil Peterson <phil@netscape.com>

Phil Peterson has news regarding the Mail/News client:

The mail/news group is having some extremely productive weeks right now. We're not blocked on very many things, and lots of new functionality is coming soon. The difficulty of getting our Mac build off the floor has caused us to lose a little momentum on message composition.

This week

  • One news host is visible in the folder pane (news.mozilla.org)
  • First life of an Address Book UI (not part of the main build yet)
  • Lots of design work on the composition window, address book, and sidebar integration.
  • First life of IMAP in the thread pane.
  • Drafted plan for unified (Navigator and Messenger) auto-complete based on the Editor.
  • Milestones doc up-to-date with M5 accomplishments and M6 goals.
Next week
  • Finish up M5. Mail/news M5 bugs are here. We need to do some triage on Monday.
  • Plowing through M6 work. See the milestones doc.
  • Hopefully Mac mailnews can be included on Tinderbox. The release team is working on it, but it's a gnarly problem.
Footprint watch
  • Win32: Just a little bigger than last week.
  • Linux: Something bad is happening in libmailnews.so.
  • Mac: Not added to Tinderbox yet
Win32 Linux
msglocal.dll
83,024
liblocalmail.so
274,500
msgcompose.dll
82,320
libmsgcompose.so
180,328
mailnews.dll
73,264
libmailnews.so
(what's up here?) 848,464
mime.dll
84,688
libmime.so
147,380
msgnews.dll
62,096
libmsgnews.so
135,768
msgdb.dll
138,928
libmsgdb.so
98,760
n/a
libmsgbaseutil.so
76,584
mimect-vcard.dll
36,512
libmimect-vcard.so
63,324
htmlemitter.dll
8,512
libhtmlemitter.so
14,972
xmlemitter.dll
9,024
libxmlemitter.so
14,924
rawemitter.dll
6,992
librawemitter.so
12,872
Total
585,360
1,867,876

 

Previous Updates