24
Feb 08

0.8 release status update

I guess some of you are asking themselves how we are doing with respect to our next major release. So here’s a short update:

At the moment we are down to seven blocker bugs, which will need to be fixed before we push out the first release candidate. The status on those bugs is:

  • One tracking bug with only one outstanding issue. We could release without this bug getting fixed.
  • One documentation bug (release notes). A first draft for the release notes is ready. The notes are currently awaiting developer feedback.
  • Three bugs have a patch or a solution was proposed, so we’re optimistic here
  • Two bugs, where we are currently investigating a solution

I’m sorry that we’re not fixing those bugs faster, but two of our main developers are away for a few weeks and such a 33% drop in manpower is hard to handle for such a small project as ours.

But there’s also something positive to mention:
A few days ago, the last outstanding localization completed the translation of newly added strings. That means that Sunbird builds for all 29 languages (including English) are now available for testing purposes. For Lightning we’ll provide localized builds when the first release candidate (RC1) comes out. But all our non-English testers are encouraged to give builds in their native language a try.

English test builds for Sunbird are available here.
All other 28 languages can bei downloaded from here.


24
Feb 08

Lightning/Sunbird Status Update (February 24)

One more week has gone by and some 24 bugs got fixed. The most notable fix this week was probably:

  • Bug 366177: Memory cache for storage provider
    This patch gives us a performance improvement of somewhere between 5% to 10% on local storage calendars. Our thanks go to Daniel for implementing the patch. Philipp and Sebastian Schwieger also helped on this.

Here is the list of all the 24 bugs which were fixed within the last week:

  • Bug 366177: Memory cache for storage provider
  • Bug 379198: Make Lightning understand event updates
  • Bug 395654: Failure to renegotiate digest auth
  • Bug 401273: Alarms added to all events imported via CSV file
  • Bug 402841: Copy an event to the calendar and it shows up as the day before
  • Bug 403594: ‘Last day of the month’ recurrence rule has been screwed up
  • Bug 409966: ‘Workweek days only’ option is inversed after update from 0.7
  • Bug 410635: Task/Event to eMail conversion -> subject gets a leading ‘Re:’
  • Bug 410931: Update internal timezone definitions
  • Bug 412746: Email addresses defect after event->task conversion on Mac
  • Bug 413868: Lightning forces Thunderbird to English due to shipping sunbird-only files
  • Bug 414821: Timezone dialog throws error when OS timezone doesn’t fit to internal timezone
  • Bug 416240: Network ics calendar displays online but does not cache for offline access
  • Bug 417526: Task preview pane corrupts Mail mode window layout
  • Bug 417911: Fire viewloaded event when view is loaded
  • Bug 418237: Pinstripe typo, Error in parsing value for property -moz-image-region
  • Bug 418251: Categories toolbar-button popup menu are not sorted locally dependent
  • Bug 418296: Unifinder event list sort key caching speed improvement
  • Bug 418387: Task contextmenu: Mark Completed menuitem is often not correctly prechecked
  • Bug 418585: No working Sunbird 0.8pre nightly builds available for Mac OS X
  • Bug 418647: Follow-up comment on timezones
  • Bug 418657: Hide Completed Task feature is broken in task list
  • Bug 418792: L10n specific preferences not working
  • Bug 418995: CSV import creates empty fields datastores

Special thanks again go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that made this possible.


18
Feb 08

Calendar Community Test Day On Thursday, February 21st

Our next test day will be on Thursday, February 21st. It will be the
final test day in preparation for the first release candidate of
Lightning and Sunbird 0.8. We need your help to test some crucial
features in both products.

The handling of time zones in Sunbird and Lightning has greatly improved,
and you should be able to import and subscribe to calendars created with
other calendar applications without any problems. We also updated our
internal time zones according to the recent official changes. You can
test the functionality using calendars (also created with other
software), and checking if the events and tasks are shown at the correct
times in the calendar views and task list.

The new Task mode with its own toolbar in Lightning is one of the
prominent features for the upcoming release. Please have a look at this
feature, and try it out as extensively as possible.

When testing the experimental offline support and initial timezone guessing, please have a look at the Test Day Wiki Page for instructions. We are particularly interested in your experiences using the experimental offline support, whether positive or negative. Please add a comment to the end of the ‘What specifically will we be testing?’ section of the Test Day Wiki Page.

Our last test day has been a great success, especially the number of
Litmus testcases run. Andreas Treumann used the feedback on unclear and
broken testcases to improve those, and our testcases should be more
up-to-date now.

We suggest that you try a mix of Litmus and ad-hoc testing. Ad-hoc
testing is testing where you attempt to use the product like a “normal
user” to find any issues that crop up along the way. You also try to
make the program break by doing unexpected things, just do anything you
can imagine – mix up events, emails, tasks, calendar types etc. When you
find something, take a look at the Error Console (especially before
submitting a bug report), since there is usually very valuable
information there that points to the cause of the bug.

As usual there are also some fixed bugs that need to be verified.
You simply add a comment to the bug report stating what product, version
and operating system you used while verifying the bug fixed.

Join us in #calendar-qa on Thursday. All the information on the test day
is on our usual Test Day Wiki Page.

Happy Testing!


17
Feb 08

Lightning/Sunbird Status Update (February 17)

Nearly three weeks have gone by since the last status update. The reason for this was me being pretty busy with my day job, not the developers being idle and not fixing bugs. In fact 51 bugs were fixed in the last 19 days.

One bugfix is of special importance:

  • Bug 327780: Need to sort out what sort of toolbar UI to offer for Lightning
    This bug enables new icons in Lightning and Sunbird which should better match the Thunderbird theme. The patch also creates a new toolbar for the task mode, which only shows task-related actions. The same goes for the menus in task mode, where all event-related functionality was removed. Our thanks go to Berend for implementing this huge patch, to Christian for his UI design work and to Mickey and Philipp for their code reviews.

Here is the list of all the 51 bugs which were fixed within the last 19 days:

  • Bug 265971: n in SUMMARY of VEVENT not interpreted
  • Bug 321010: Need better stripping of illegal css chars from category names
  • Bug 327780: Need to sort out what sort of toolbar UI to offer for Lightning
  • Bug 340949: Server cannot cope with floating events, fallback to user default
  • Bug 389341: Tooltips too tall: only expand, don’t shrink height
  • Bug 391379: Does not work behind a proxy with authentication
  • Bug 393817: Reduce network usage by CalDAV provider
  • Bug 400450: Check removed-files for wrong entries
  • Bug 402407: PNGs can be re-compressed further
  • Bug 406576: Investigate calIcalProperty::setDatetime_ for parentless properties
  • Bug 407808: Quick-add field shrinks to a few pixel height
  • Bug 408652: Task event conversion: no description text
  • Bug 408786: Recurring event to task conversion is not possible
  • Bug 408968: It’s not possible to convert a WCAP invitation in to a task
  • Bug 412622: Wrong display of importance icons
  • Bug 412723: reopened Add LoginManager bits to trunk win32 installer
  • Bug 412723: Fix HTTP authentication bustage on trunk
  • Bug 412737: Don’t show readonly calendars in file picker
  • Bug 412918: New Tasks run out of the view
  • Bug 413128: All calendars are deselected after Lightning update
  • Bug 413159: Changing calendar for tasks via context menu doesn’t work
  • Bug 413265: Some timezones not mapped correctly
  • Bug 413474: Delete button in Mail mode does not delete events or tasks
  • Bug 413484: CVS remove unused files from calendar/resources/content
  • Bug 413715: Unifinder search is broken
  • Bug 414519: Recurring event without gd:when breaks parsing
  • Bug 414537: Task preview pane should show a link to a web page
  • Bug 414573: Print button is always enabled in Mail mode
  • Bug 414790: Missing calendar-management.js in imip-bar-overlay.xul
  • Bug 414897: Correct capitalization of imipHtml.Comment
  • Bug 415081: Get rid of lightning-wcap.xpi
  • Bug 415253: Reload causes error in hidden Unifinder
  • Bug 415495: Remove calendar controllers to fix XPConnect assertions
  • Bug 415513: Add Japanese locale to Calendar
  • Bug 415654: Use different alarm icon for suppressed alarms
  • Bug 415759: Errors on sunbird startup
  • Bug 415894: Remove Punjabi as a supported locale
  • Bug 415956: Unifinder is always sorted by event title after startup
  • Bug 415987: FREEBUSY decoding does not support comma-separated entries
  • Bug 415990: JS warning: while(calGoItem = calGoPopupMenu.firstChild)
  • Bug 416158: Keyboard navigation of the event list (unifinder) is slow
  • Bug 416206: Erroneous drag’n’drop with tasks in multiweek/month view
  • Bug 416525: Add Link for task or event does not work (URL is not saved)
  • Bug 416608: Unifinder close-button seems to be in a selected state
  • Bug 416802: Additional properties to allow easy customization of days in the views
  • Bug 416851: Implement offline interfaces for GDATA
  • Bug 417056: Disable wcap caching until dependant bugs are fixed
  • Bug 417429: JS-errors when trying to Compose E-Mail to Attendees from Sunbird
  • Bug 417508: Event dialog broken, impossible to edit events and tasks
  • Bug 417515: Removing Progress or Priority button in task mode causes startup error
  • Bug 417873: CalDAV provider needs to fire onLoad

Special thanks again go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that made this possible.

Due to the huge amount of bugfixes, we could really use your help in testing all the new stuff that went in lately. So if you want to help, join us on our next bugday.


16
Feb 08

TestDays, Status, and Timezones Oh My!

In our last QA Chat, we decided to revive our old tradition of blogging about the test day results. So, on our last testday we had really great participation from a whole host of folks, and four of these intrepid individuals burned through our Litmus tests, running 313 tests. Overall, 6 new bugs were found. Congratulations to thetux for taking the cup with a whopping 210 tests run!!

We are continuing to push on toward the 0.8 release candidate. In that vein, I’d like to make a special plea for testing. We are about to check in the code that will update the time zone database. Once that happens, we need you to do two things:

  • TEST: We could really use your help in testing this. You know your own time zone far better than we do, so make sure your calendar switches into and out of summer time (or doesn’t switch at all) at the appropriate dates for this year.
  • BACKUP:If you have been running the 0.8 nightly builds, then you MUST backup your local (non-network) calendars (export them to ICS) BEFORE upgrading to a build with this change in it. The details are in bugzilla, but if you are running some of the 0.8pre builds, then this change might break your calendar when you update to the latest nightly.

What if I am running 0.7 (or earlier)? In that case, you are fine. You should be able to upgrade to 0.8 with no problems. Of course, it is always a good idea to periodically backup your calendars anyway. This issue occurs because we don’t support upgrades between nightly versions, only between released versions of the software.

That said, we know a number of early adopters have already made the switch to 0.8pre builds and we want them to be aware of this potential issue.


06
Feb 08

Calendar Community Test Day On Thursday

Our next test day will be on Thursday, February 7th. It will be a
general test day in preparation for the first release candidate of
Lightning and Sunbird 0.8.

We identified some areas where we need your help testing both products:

  • The unifinder (aka event list) has been partly rewritten, and we have
    already found (and fixed) some regressions.
  • The handling of non-native timezones in Sunbird and Lightning has
    greatly improved, and you should be able to import and subscribe to
    calendars created with other calendar applications without any of the
    prominent problems, like shifting start and end times in the event
    dialog and calendar views. We will provide one or more calendar files
    with non-native timezones for testing on our Test Day Wiki Page.
  • Every aspect of task related functionality in Lightning, especially
    the Task mode.

For testing our new features, the experimental offline cache and initial
timezone guessing, please have a look at the Test Day Wiki Page for
instructions.

We suggest that you try a mix of Litmus and ad-hoc testing. Ad-hoc
testing is testing where you attempt to use the product like a “normal
user” to find any issues that crop up along the way. You also try to
make the program break by doing unexpected things, just do anything you
can imagine – mix up events, emails, tasks, calendar types etc. When you
find something, take a look at the Error Console (especially before
submitting a bug report), since there is usually very valuable
information there that points to the cause of the bug.

As usual there are also some fixed bugs that need to be verified.
You simply add a comment to the bug report stating what product, version
and operating system you used while verifying the bug fixed.

Join us in #calendar-qa on Thursday. All the information on the test day
is on our usual Test Day Wiki Page.

Happy Testing!