Monthly Archives: October 2007

Lightning / Sunbird — 48 Comments
25
Oct 07

Lightning 0.7 & Sunbird 0.7 have been released

I am happy to report, that the 0.7 of Lightning and Sunbird has been completed and is now available via AMO and the Calendar Project website.

Just 1.5 weeks after our originally scheduled release date, Lightning 0.7 and Sunbird 0.7 bring us a huge step closer to our 1.0 release, which we hope to release in 2008.

Notable improvements of this release are:

  • It is now much easier to switch between the mail and calendar parts of Thunderbird thanks to a user interface redesign
  • A redesigned event/task dialog has been enabled to gather feedback from the community. It offers a much cleaner user interface and additional functionality including:
    • Events/Tasks can be created in different timezones
    • Attendees can be added from a local or corporate LDAP directory
    • Free-Busy information is available for users of the Sun Java Calendar Server
    • Integrated display of recurrence patterns, reminders and attendees
    • Custom recurrences and reminders
    • Clear separation between tasks and events
  • The new event summary dialog lists all the details of tasks and events for calendar which are read-only
  • The Today Pane gives a quick overview over your current tasks and upcoming events. The Today Pane can be enabled/disabled by a toolbar button
  • Colliding events (events in the same time slot) are shrunk so that they fit into the display of a day. This no longer affects other events on the same day
  • Localized releases of Lightning and Sunbird in Chinese (simplified), Georgian, Lithuanian, Portuguese (European), Spanish (Argentina) and Turkish
  • A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website

Lightning 0.7 and Sunbird 0.7 are available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 27 different languages including English.

Please use the following links to download the release:

Please read the release notes for Lightning 0.7 and Sunbird 0.7 before downloading.

Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. We would not be able to do this without your assistance!

UPDATE: We have heard reports, that after upgrading Lightning to 0.7 all tasks and events are no longer displayed. To get your tasks and events back, switch to Calendar Mode using the toolbar button below the folder pane and ensure that all your calendars are marked as visible.

Lightning / Sunbird — 5 Comments
20
Oct 07

0.7 status update (October 20)

Very late during our test cycle we found one bug that is serious enough to warrant an RC3. It is bug 400407. Thanks to the help of Nick Thomas (cf) from Mozilla IT we have a patch ready, but are waiting on some
of the comments to be addressed before checking it in.

We also said that if we spun an RC3 we would take bug 385155, since it is serious enough to need fixing in 0.7 and is a very low risk change. The patch for bug 385155 has already been checked in.

We should get the RC3 to you as soon as possible. Hopefully, it will be available Monday or Tuesday.

We’re almost there!

Lightning / QA / Sunbird — 8 Comments
19
Oct 07

How many Calendar bugs are fixed these days?

While reading LpSolit’s article about the number of people fixing bugs on Bugzilla I thought that I should try to do the same for Calendar. Unfortunately this didn’t really work as a lot of our fixed bugs were never assigned to the person who developed the fix and that completely screws our numbers.

So I thought of a second-best option: The overall number of bugs fixed per quarter for the last five years (click to enlarge):

What the numbers (and especially the moving average) clearly show is that we’ve been picking up some serious steam and are more active than ever.

Lightning — 35 Comments
18
Oct 07

Future of Lightning support for TB 1.5

After reading the notice at the top of http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/all-older.html that as of today TB 1.5 will no longer be supported, I was thinking whether it would make sense to drop support for the TB 1.5 series after the 0.7 release.

I see the following reasons for this:

  • As the TB 1.5 core code is pretty old, it hurts in a variety of places. See bug 330121, bug 351997, bug 389384 or bug 397920 for examples
  • We have a very small team of core developers. And testing changes on TB 2, TB 1.5 and Sunbird puts a great burden on their shoulders. Dropping TB 1.5 from the requirements list would ease that burden
  • Our testing community uses TB 2 almost exclusively, so TB 1.5 specific bugs are often found very late if ever
  • Most Thunderbird users will probably already have made the switch to TB 2. So we wouldn’t lose lots of users here

I would be interested in hearing your feedback on this.

Lightning / Sunbird — 8 Comments
17
Oct 07

0.7 RC 2 is out

We have just released Lightning & Sunbird 0.7 RC2 two weeks after we released our first release candidate (RC1). The RC2 is available in 27 languages (including English) for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (Universal).

The RC2 contains the following fixes that were added after the RC1:

  • Bug 375390:
    New event boxes appear too large in month/multiweek view
  • Bug 397642:
    stale agenda update
  • Bug 398046:
    Add Turkish as an officially supported language
  • Bug 398278:
    Superfluous freebusy debug messages in javascript console
  • Bug 398303:
    Attendee preview is broken in new event summary dialog
  • Bug 399433:
    Automatic scrolling feature doesn’t work when searching for the next free meeting slot
  • Bug 399616:
    Event on daylight saving time start or end day shows incorrect hour in day and week view
  • Bug 399780:
    Automatic reminders for tasks not taken into account if no day has been selected

Here’s where to get your hands on the RC:

After finishing RC2 we’re holding a community test day tomorrow (Thursday, October 18th). We need you to tell us, if Lightning and Sunbird are ready for release, or if our developers have to fix some so far unknown bugs. So, join us in #calendar-qa on Thursday. All the information on the test day is in our Test Day Wiki Page.

Thanks to everyone who has helped with this release. And, an even bigger thank you to everyone who has waited for us to release it. Thanks!

Happy 0.7!

QA — 5 Comments
15
Oct 07

New Date – Testday on THURSDAY THE 18TH!

Join us on Thursday, October 18th for the 0.7 RC2 test day. Help us determine if there are any show stoppers that should be fixed before we release 0.7.

We already found three show-stopper bugs, and that’s why we had to reschedule the test day from Tuesday to Thursday. The new build is being crafted, and will be ready for us on Thursday. There are three things that must be tested:

  • We must spot-check each locale to verify that they display properly (you can do this even if you can’t read that language).
  • We must make certain the bugs we found (399433, 399616, and 399780) were fixed properly. Note that these were all found by people just like you: you can make a difference!
  • We must make certain no new bugs were introduced when those were fixed

You can read all the details on the Test Day Wiki.

We hope to see you on Thursday the 18th in #calendar and #calendar-qa. Come join the excitement and be a part of the 0.7 release.

See you Thursday!

Lightning / Localization / Sunbird — 4 Comments
10
Oct 07

Notes from the talk with Ascher and Code freeze announcement

Notes from the discussion with David Ascher and the team are on the wiki. I take notes in mediawiki formating and it’s just easier to post them that way.

One thing Simon forgot to mention is that we will be code-freezing for 0.7 RC2 this Friday at 23:59:59 UTC. So if you are the owner of any of the following localization bugs, please get them fixed, or let us know if there is something blocking you.

  • Basque: Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399291)
  • Macedonian: Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399290)
  • Turkish: Missing default preferences (Bug 398046)

Please help us out on Tuesday, October 16, for smoke testing of the final 0.7 release. You can find us in #calendar and #calendar-qa on IRC.
Thanks!

Lightning — 4 Comments
10
Oct 07

A conference call with David Ascher

In our weekly open developer confcall, that happens on every Wednesday we had a visitor today: David Ascher, the new CEO of MailCo or whatever it will be named.

We talked about a lot of things with David:

  • Lightning/Sunbird release strategy
  • Major obstacles to extension developers in Thunderbird and how those can be overcome
  • David asked for suggestions for people who he might hire to work on Thunderbird
  • Things that MailCo can do to support major extensions like Lightning (e.g. build support)
  • The future of Thunderbird (e.g. Thunderbird 3 plans)
  • and some minor stuff

We won’t disclose all details of the discussion (like the future of Thunderbird discussion), because David will speak about that once he has sketched out a roadmap. But we’re now more positive about Thunderbird’s future and Lightning’s role in it, than we were a few days ago, when we heard that David Bienvenu and Scott MacGregor are leaving the Mozilla Corporation.

More info will be posted later on this blog as Clint has taken some pretty detailed meeting notes, that he will post here in a short while. Let’s end this post with saying that David is really a great guy to talk to and we were very happy to discuss our views with him. Thanks David!

Lightning / Localization / Sunbird — 1 Comment
10
Oct 07

Lightning/Sunbird 0.7 localization status

I want to give you a short update on the state of localization for the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 0.7 release. The RC1 was released last week on October 4th. Since we haven’t noticed any additional serious issues, a RC2 will come within the next few days.

While most localizations look fine from a quick glance, some still have minor issues, which need to be resolved within the next 2-3 days. The affected localizations are:

  • Basque (eu): Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399290)
  • Hungarian (hu): Missing default preferences (Bug 399241)
  • Macedonian (mk): Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399291)
  • Punjabi (pa-IN): 50% of user interface strings are displayed in English (Bug 398067)
  • Turkish (tr): Missing default preferences (Bug 398046)

As we have seen no reaction from the Mongolian (mn) localizer, there will be no localized Mongolian builds for 0.7.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or post a comment here in the blog.

Lightning / Sunbird — 9 Comments
08
Oct 07

Lightning/Sunbird status update (October 08)

The 0.7 RC1 has been out for a few days and has already been downloaded a few thousand times. We have already taken a few additional fixes, which will be in the next RC and are detailed below:

  • Bug 375390:
    New event boxes appear too large in month/multiweek view
  • Bug 397642:
    stale agenda update
  • Bug 398278:
    Superfluous freebusy debug messages in javascript console
  • Bug 398303:
    Attendee preview is broken in new event summary dialog

I also want to remind you of the community test day tomorrow on Tuesday, October 9th. We need you to tell us, if Lightning and Sunbird are ready for release, or if our developers have to fix some so far unknown bugs. Also the localized versions of Lightning and Sunbird need to be checked for completeness and correctness. So, join us in #calendar-qa on irc.mozilla.org tomorrow.

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