status update

maintained by Chris Nelson <chrisn@statecollege.com>

Last Updated Monday, January 11th, 1999

This status update page is updated every Friday evening or Saturday morning (but check back, because I may add in late updates on the 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

Module Updates
XPToolkit
January 10th
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • David Hyatt has come up with what looks like a possible breakthrough on the widget/frame interface issue that has been holding up the XUL loader implementation.  Checkin is pending agreement with the Gecko team, and final implementation, but he has widgets loading, and it looks like will be able to provide this to other teams in the coming week.
Lowlights
  • We have been spinning our wheels and getting little or no traction.  We missed the XUL-> DOM sink milestone for M3, but hopefully only by a weekend. Other items that were dependent on this are in day-for-day slip.
Accomplishments
  • Finally getting some traction on Mac/Linux platform parity, having identified the key bugs to fix, assigned owners and platform assistance, and begun debugging.
  • Posted a draft of the Application Object Model (AOM) document.
  • Merged the architecture and AOM documents together, built a detailed outline.
  • Made a new XPCOM page for mozilla & further updated nsCOMPtr user manual.
  •  Data Model Widgets spec written, posted publicly, and updated.
  •  Command Architecture spec written, posted publicly, and updated.
  • Posted a strawman  XPFE Drag and Drop story,  including some basic requirements.
Decisions
  • We thought we had resolved the approach to widgets and extending their formatting in a meeting with Gecko folks on 12/21, but new resistance arose last week.  We need to kill this snake, and stop playing with it.
  • Same deal for the decision on using XUL vs RDF for widget resources, which is still getting resistance from some RDF proponents. We still plan to use XUL, but if we can't get the loader working in the next week then we'll have to fall back on using RDF.
  • We will not be using HTML 4 tables to implement the treeview widget.
  • XPToolkit (evaughan) will own the progressLib code.
Issues
  • We are repeatedly having problems getting decisions communicated to and accepted by other teams, avoiding having them reversed, and getting cooperation once they are made.  One example is the old decision to use XUL rather than RDF, another is the 12/21 decision to use the frame interface rather than the widget interface for widgets.  XPToolkit, XPApps and others have been held up due to our inability to get and keep these issues resolved.  We are working to get them resolved in a way that everyone can live with, but it feels very much like 'us vs them',  and with some teams we are spending more time in disagreement than cooperation.
  • I don't think we are adequately engaging the net, or getting a good return on what little effort we are making to do so. We seem to post decisions more than issues/discussions, which prevents the net from potentially making valuable early contributions. We aren't always seeing this type of help when we do solicit it early, but we certainly won't if we aren't consistently trying.
  • Platform parity effort does not have full support and high priority throughout engineering. Currently it has mainly involved the same Mac/Linux platform experts who have always kept those platforms running. That doesn't fit the new development organization.
People
  • We have 6-7 new Mac developers signed up to contribute on mozilla.org.
  • Scott Collins will arrive onsite Wednesday, and will be available to help resolve any lingering issues starting that afternoon through Feb 2.
RDF and HT (HyperTree)
January 8th
Submitted by Chris Waterson <waterson@netscape.com>

Chris Waterson writes in with this RDF update:

  • Got a demo mail data source up and running and into the tree control. Current builds should show a set of demo accounts.
  • Fixed some RDF parser bugs in the RDF/XML data source. Can "round trip" (write back) modified RDF files now.
  • Working on getting notifications & commands wired up to the tree and content model.
  • Address book data source work underway

 
Editor
January 8th
Submitted by Akkana Peck <akkana@netscape.com>

Here's Akkana's update on the status of the editor (composer):

Most of the editor team, being non-windows developers, have been called to help with the Platform Parity Push and have been spending their efforts helping other groups in getting the Linux and Mac code up to speed.

But meanwhile, our Windows contingent has been busy adding transactions: Editor Mode (in the Tools menu) is now hooked up and allows typing (though it doesn't yet take into account the location of the selection, so text gets inserted at the wrong place). There are some editor tests hooked up to special keys, so don't be surprised if odd things happen when hitting keys like Insert, Tab or Control-S in editor mode.

 
NSPR
January 8th
Submitted by Wan-Teh Chang <wtc@netscape.com>

Wan-Teh's update on NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime):

Larry Hardiman finished and checked in his PLEvent work (mozilla/nsprpub/lib/ds/plevent.{c,h}). He is running NSPR tests on the new Linux 2.2-pre4 kernel this week.

Srinivas and I checked in some compiler warning fixes submitted by Kathy Brade.

We also fixed NSPR implicit initialization problems (Bugzilla bugs #2227 and #2248) reported by Radha Kulkarni and John McMullen.

 
Build/Release
January 8th
Submitted by Daniel Nunes <leaf@mozilla.org>

Daniel Nunes has this update for us from the Build/Release group:

The main tinderbox page (SeaMonkey), now has Solaris columns (in addition to windows32, macintosh, and redhat linux).

The nightly binaries of viewer also seem much better this week than last, though the build/delivery/ftp-site push automation is still a bit flakey.

You can expect this to improve.

 
NGLayout
January 8th
Submitted by Troy Chevalier <troy@netscape.com>

Troy writes in with this update:

  • Steve moved off tables and onto the editor. Chris Karnaze is now the table guy
  • Kipp was on vacation for most of the holiday period...
  • Because of that I got lots of work done. :-) The only things of interest really are that if the HTML element has a 'transparent' background then it renders the background specified for the BODY. This maps things display better. Scrolling is now better. The HTML element is scrolled, not the BODY element. And margins on the BODY are handled better.
Grendel
January 8th
Submitted by Jeff Galyan <talisman@anamorphic.com>

Grendel (Java Mail/News) has been resurrected, and we have a forwarded message from Jeff Galyan giving the schedule over the next few weeks.

"Okay, so we know what we each are working on for the next few weeks:

Jeff: grendel.addressbook, grendel.composition, getting opening a mail folder (either imap or local) working

Giao: menu building from xml, event handling, HTML display"

Previous Updates