Lightning/Sunbird Status Update (January 03)

Welcome to the first status update in the new year 2008! I hope you all had a good time getting into 2008. I certainly did :-) Still, we have been busy over the christmas holidays and the Lightning/Sunbird developers have fixed quite a few bugs on the road to our 0.8 release.

Two bug-fixes are worth mentioning:

  • Bug 402177: Add functionality for hiding the unifinder easily
    The event list and search functionality (known among developers as the unifinder) can now be easily enabled or disabled by a toolbar button or the application menu. This should make working with the unifinder much more comfortable for our users.
  • Bug 410168: Circular reference in timezone references
    A lot of people have complained about the excessive memory use of Lightning or Sunbird when using remote calendars. We believe that we have found one of the causes (if not the cause) of this huge memory leak and have fixed it. Thanks go to mvl for identifying this issue and to both mvl and Daniel for fixing this bug.

Here is the list of all the 16 bugs fixed since the last status update:

  • Bug 382121: Use a javascript implementation of propertybags
  • Bug 400949: Build Lightning with Sunbird
  • Bug 402177: Add functionality for hiding the unifinder easily
  • Bug 405007: Enable unit tests on Trunk tinderboxen – Update Makefile
  • Bug 409526: Use a for loop instead of Array.some to make queryinterface a bit faster
  • Bug 409743: Add Ukrainian localization
  • Bug 409842: Remove unused journal menuitems and strings
  • Bug 409843: Unify toolbar button styles
  • Bug 410055: LAST-MODIFIED entries in an ics file are set to actual time
  • Bug 410080: Consolidate usage of ics-service
  • Bug 410086: Random events have Untitled title
  • Bug 410140: Update calendar copyright dates to 2008
  • Bug 410168: Circular reference in timezone references
  • Bug 410650: Accel+VK_DOWN for jumping to today doesn’t work
  • Bug 410664: Fix typo in calendar-toolbar.css
  • Bug 410520: Add a way to prevent the migration wizard from starting

Thanks again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters.

If you’re interested in helping out, read this article directed at developers. People without coding experience, who would like to help as well, should read this article about our recent testing initiative or our documentation efforts. Everyone of you can really make a difference here!

6 comments

  1. Since one of the last bugfixes (I don’t know which because I had not updated for a few weeks) I found that when openening a message window, the menu-bar was incomplete: the ‘File’, ‘Edit’, and ‘View’ pull downs were invisible. At the same time, custom buttons generated by the “Buttons! v0.5.3.2”-add-on were missing. A few simple tests showed that both Lightning 0.8pre and Buttons! work properly independently, but that Lightning interferes with menus and buttons when Buttons! is installed. Whether menus from other add-ons are affected I don’t know, but maybe someone else has similar experiences.
    This message is just to let you know, I don’t blame anyone here, and I hope this issue can be solved by either you or the writer of Buttons!

  2. I am using one of the nightly builds (a couple of weeks old) for lightning and I observed that if I leave lightning open for a couple of days it uses about 65MB of virtual memory and becomes very slow. I am using minimisetotray extension and Noia 2.0 extreme theme. Anyone has similar issues? My calendar is a bit dense too. Please do let me know if I can collect any debug information that may help find what the problem might be. I think the calendar app is becoming more and more useful. Great job you guys.

  3. Regarding my previous remark concerning the Add-on conflict between Lightning and Buttons! (see above): the problem exists only when I use Ubuntu-Linux; no problems under Windows XP.

  4. My own experience with the latest builds is more than promising! At last, I’m not stuck anymore because the remote calendars would freeze my system. Thanks to a couple of bugs around performance that were solved recently, Lightning is now fully usable (again).
    Kudos to the team !

  5. Remote Calenders (ics) are still very slow in month view. :-/

  6. Paolo Bernardelli

    Webdav problem
    when I share the calendar with webdav(apache 2.0) I have the problem of
    “Could not get next bucket brigade [500, #0]”
    The adsl line is not so fast and when the the lighting is saving automatically the program averlap the the last modification.
    Please insert a switch to don’t update the calendar automacally on webdav or share version!!!!
    Thank for all