So now it isn’t super-secret anymore what I’m working on in my new job.
Alex has a nice short description what it is 😉
This screen was captured from the Windows version. Other platforms will be coming.
Author Archives: wolfgang
Mozilla Buildservice Repository
Thanks to Matthias Koenig, Andreas Jaeger, Marcus Rueckert and Robert O’Callahan!
Because of those guys we finally got a complete Mozilla Buildservice Repository which now contains Firefox 2 (with Novell’s additions)
Therefore the repository now carries Firefox 2, pre-versions of SeaMonkey 1.1, Thunderbird 2.0 and XULRunner 1.8.1 in addition to the low-level libraries of NSPR 4.6.3 and NSS 3.11.3 for SUSE Linux 10.0, 10.1 and Factory.
Changes
Yes, you are right. I’m a bad blogger since my last post was again some time ago 🙁
As some people might already know I left SUSE end of september and took another position. (I won’t tell you the name of the company since nobody would know it anyway.) But expect that I’ll still be, as much as possible, involved in the openSUSE project. I also started to maintain some mozilla packages in the openSUSE buildservice. (Yes, I know that Firefox 2pre is still missing there). Please note that I’m not sure what will happen with the repository on ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/mozilla since this area was maintained by me just for fun.
This week I started my new work in the Netherlands, though I will work from home in the end. I can’t tell you much at this point since some stuff is a little bit secret but this will change soon AFAIK.
The Mozilla Platform on SUSE
As CODE10 bugfix mode is almost over now I want to give a short overview what’s coming on the Mozilla front in SUSE Linux 10.2 timeframe with focus on the “Mozilla platform” aka XULRunner aka GeckoRuntimeEnvironment (GRE) and so on.
So the first thing to mention is that the Gecko roadmap states that Gecko 1.9 will not be ready within our deadline and therefore we can expect to have Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2 and SeaMonkey 1.1 in the SUSE Linux 10.2 release. It also means that we won’t have XULRunner 1.9 but a 1.8.1 release. That’s important to know and I’ll come back to this later.
With SUSE Linux 10.1 (and all other CODE10 products) we are shipping the packages mozilla-xulrunner and its development subpackage gecko-sdk in versions 1.8.0.x. This has changed already in FACTORY (which is our moving development tree) and now there are the following packages:
- mozilla-xulrunner180 (replaces mozilla-xulrunner)
- mozilla-xulrunner180-l10n (new subpackage containing toolkit localizations other than en-US)
- mozilla-xulrunner180-devel (replaces gecko-sdk)
The naming change and some other changes within the package were made to make it possible to have different versions of XULRunner installed on one system. As you can see there is still only one version allowed from a major Gecko release. So the next packages which will appear on FACTORY are mozilla-xulrunner181 etc. and some time in the future (if versioning scheme doesn’t change) mozilla-xulrunner190. There are also changes to adopt the structure and naming scheme according to Ben’s (XULRunner project lead) proposal which is primarily meant for version 1.9 and I don’t want to change the filesystem locations for the 1.8.0.x versions to keep it as compatible as possible with our released package. The upcoming 1.8.1.x package will most probably still follow the same directory structure. (Please note that I still have to figure out some details to make minor version upgrades possible without breaking applications embedding libgtkembedmoz.so using rpath or environment tricks.)
Coming back to the consequence of the unavailability of XULRunner 1.9 in 10.2 timeframe.
In short: Nothing will change 😉
Long description:
Applications using libgtkembedmoz.so will still have to use workarounds to be able to find the correct version of the library. (see Novell bug 184911) In most cases this workaround is using rpath. Please see what’s coming with XULRunner 1.9 in the future. Every application using gtkmozembed should use this linking strategy when XULRunner 1.9 is finally there.
FOSDEM
hmm, first a Happy new year to everyone (it really was a long time ago as I wrote my last post here :-()
In the meantime I’ve evaluated if I can visit FOSDEM this year. Unfortunately this seems to be not possible. Have I ever wrote about the disadvantages you see when you work officially in a non-development department and try to get budget for a travel to a developer conference? This is really frustrating!
Some good news: SUSE Linux 10.1 will (most probably) contain SeaMonkey 1.0 as replacement for Mozilla (the suite) in addition to Firefox. (Yes, I’m still using the suite in some places.)
Mozilla Summit
I’m in Mountain View (California) this week to attend the Mozilla Summit. It’s something like a developer conference (and some party to celebrate the Firefox 1.5 release) and it’s really nice to meet all the guys I worked with the last five years and being part of the community on that project. Interesting that I had to travel to the US to meet the other german/austrian people the first time face-to-face. Unfortunately even in California it’s pretty cold at the moment (especially at night).
Sunbird localization
I haven’t posted here since a long time now 🙁 (too many things happened during the last weeks)
However I was active in building current snapshots of Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, XULrunner and so on.
While preparing a current trunk version for Sunbird 0.3a1 I found that localization (and some other stuff) isn’t really integrated as it is with FF and TB. So I’ve decided to take some time getting this into better shape and to move localization stuff into the l10n repository at mozilla.org. The current status is in bug 267981.
Thunderbird 1.5b2
Today synced out a 1.5b2 build of Thunderbird to the FTP area. It finally contains Enigmail 0.93.0 as extension registration is much “easier” with 1.5 series. (I really like it; it’s just so that not so many extensions are upgraded to provide the new needed infrastructure.)
i10n is not complete (only de is available but not active) yet but hopefully will follow soon (this week?).
If someone wants to package global extensions or themes in RPM format, please contact me. I can give some hints probably.
security updates
Just synced the latest Firefox and Mozilla security updates to the staging server. Mozilla 1.7.12 and 1.0.7 should be visible soon on FTP mirrors out there. (real official YOU updates will follow soon)
I’ve restructured the directories a little bit but for now there are links pointing to the new locations. Those will disappear sometime for clarity reasons, though. In addition I started to provide metadata usable by YaST and YUM together with pages created by repoview. For now this is only available for 9.3 and 10.0 in directories named the same way.
experimental repository
Back from Brainshare Europe which was again a very interesting experience. (And I didn’t find the time to write something during this event ;-)). I’ve met some guys I only knew by mail by then. But I wonder why I’m always away in the final days before a new release or new security issues coming up in mozilla stuff. Fortunately the VPN to the office was usable to some extent.
During these days there was a discussion on the openSUSE list about having a YaST repository for the experimental mozilla/firefox stuff. So now there is a yum repository (usable by YaST on 10.0) for it (thanks to cthiel for his hints). But please note that experimental is really true here. Sometimes there might be versions which don’t work at all. A repository for the stable versions will follow soon.