Mozilla Calendar Project Blog Its about time for some news…

Ok, 34 days without a status update :-( Some of you might think, that there’s nothing to report… which is wrong. We’re still there, we’re still fixing bugs, we’re still working hard to on the next release. In fact, even with the Christmas holidays, the Christmas shopping, the year-end preparations and celebrations we still fixed 46 bugs in the last 34 days.

But before I come to that, let’s look at 2008 as a whole. 2008 was the year, where we fixed 866 bugs. The highest count since the creation of the project eight years ago. Our leading bug-fixer that year was Philipp Kewisch (Fallen) with 190 bugs fixed. Right on his heels was Daniel Boelzle (dbo) with 176 fixed bugs, followed by Berend Cornelius (berend) with 96 bugfixes on third place. Congratulations guys!

One thing is bothering me though. As I already said yesterday we’re way to dependent on very few precious souls, which do most of the development work in the project. If you look at the numbers 53,35% of all fixed bugs in 2008 were fixed by the top3 bugfixers. 63,39% were fixed by the top5 and nearly 77% (76,91% to be exact) were fixed by our top10 development contributors. Hopefully in 2009 we can broaden our base some more while still retaining the extraordinary talent that we have in our current developer base.

That said, here’s the list of the 46 bugs fixed since the last status update:

• Bug 353696: View/Number-of-weeks is not updated with Option weeks-to-show
• Bug 384554: Kazakhstan Holidays Calendar
• Bug 402336: Luxembourg Holidays 2008/2009
• Bug 402365: Tabs break calendar mode view
• Bug 404039: New added tasks don’t appear in task list
• Bug 405650: Integer overflow during creating custom reminders
• Bug 420340: Snooze icons not transparent, grey background
• Bug 432704: Drag and Drop in Month/Multiweek view fails
• Bug 445729: Enable compare-locales for Calendar
• Bug 451821: X-Props are not roundtripped (dismiss or snooze alarms doesn’t work)
• Bug 456379: Thunderbird3: Remove lightning calendar/task toolbars
• Bug 458564: “Mail with no Date header not accepted here” failure
• Bug 460266: ‘Open task’ menu via context menu is broken
• Bug 461124: Mode/Tab doesn’t change when using Alt+[1234]
• Bug 462048: Monthly recurrence rule “Last Day Of Month” breaks Custom Recurrence Dialog
• Bug 462109: Convert eMail to event/task -> Recipient should not added to the attendees list
• Bug 462278: Week view should default to being scrolled to the “Day Starts At” time
• Bug 463014: Columns in task list are not persistent
• Bug 463050: Slight improvements to calIAlarm
• Bug 465551: Additional localization comments needed in calendar-event-dialog.properties
• Bug 466009: Calendar property page is missing Cancel/Ok
• Bug 466655: Organizer adds an alarm and/or a category -> notification eMail dialog pops up
• Bug 466664: Using Lightning makes text on Thunderbird’s tabs too large
• Bug 466981: Delete a single instance of a recurring event -> exceptions are gone
• Bug 467001: itip exception
• Bug 467069: Consolidate decorated-month-view-binding and decorated-multiday-view-binding
• Bug 467156: Fix calendar mode borders
• Bug 467330: Shortcalendarweek and shortCalendarWeek used in the same file
• Bug 467336: Recurrence dialog: datepicker elements are missing a backround graphic
• Bug 467351: Get rid of bug fix for bug 348009
• Bug 467546: Consolidate calendar-multiday-view.xml and calendar-month-view.xml
• Bug 467652: Reproducible hang when retrieving remote ICS calendar
• Bug 467724: Sunbird win32 l10n builds missing since 25-Nov-2008
• Bug 467756: Thunderbird versions on beta1 branch do not accept Lightning anymore
• Bug 467909: Remove datepicker in Lightning sidebar
• Bug 468020: Regex used to parse RFC3339 dates is incorrect
• Bug 468077: Add gl to calendar/locales/all-locales file
• Bug 468999: Add calendar.debug.log and calendar.debug.log.verbose to default prefs
• Bug 469355: Frequent hangs of “win2k3 comm-central sunbird” buildbot
• Bug 469554: Use pluralForm in Task tree – Due In column
• Bug 469840: Recurring Sundays incorrect
• Bug 470394: Guard all SQL transactions in case of database corruption
• Bug 470623: Change the property name WARN_UNSUPPORTED_MSG to WARN_MIN_SUPPORTED_OS_MSG
• Bug 470894: Finnish holidays for 2009
• Bug 470987: Sunbird.exe should have the manifest with requestedExecutionLevel=”asInvoker”
• Bug 471195: 2009 Holiday File for India

Speaking on behalf of the Mozilla Calendar project, I want to say a big thank you to everyone, who has contributed to our project in 2008, be it by providing bug fixes, doing QA work, writing documentation, writing bug reports or just telling some friends about our software. Thank you very much! I hope you stay with us in 2009. Happy new year to everyone!

We’re just two days away from 2009, so this is probably a good time to look back on 2008 and some of the good and some of the not so good stuff that happened in that year from my own perspective.

First the good stuff:

• We released two fine releases this year with 0.8 in early April and 0.9 in late September. Both releases were well received by our users and had a considerable amount of new features and UI improvements, which most people loved.
• Our development transition from the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH on CVS to the current Gecko 1.9.1 backend on Mercurial (the trunk) went very smoothly. Given the fact, that we had essentially abandoned the trunk for nearly 18 months and had had close to no testing on the trunk during our time on the branch, everything went very well. I think this speaks well with regards to the skills of our developers as well as the maturity of the mozilla platform that this was so rather painless.
• We’re well on our way to our 1.0 release and the integration of Lightning into Thunderbird 3. We’ve made some great progress on the road to integrate Lightning better into Thunderbird. The emergence of Mozilla Messaging and the energy that David Ascher and his newly assembled team have brought into the Thunderbird community make it much more exciting today to work on extending Thunderbird’s capabilities than was the case 12 or 18 months ago.
• We had some great team-building events this year. The 3rd face-to-face meeting in Hamburg, the Mozilla summit in Whistler and the Mozilla Camp Europe in Barcelona were great highlights of 2008 that both excited the community as well as the developers and other contributors that were part of these events. My thanks go to Sun for hosting the frist event and to the Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Europe for hosting the last two.

Now the not so good stuff:

• We have not yet come to the point where Lightning is part of the default Thunderbird installation. We’re having some sort of a chicken-egg problem right now. The Thunderbird crew currently does not want to enable Lightning by default in Thunderbird 3 nightly builds because of quality reasons. But we want them to enable Lightning by default ASAP because that would broaden our testing and QA coverage significantly, thereby enabling us to remove those bugs faster and more easily, that the Thunderbird crew currently sees as blocking the activation of Lightning. We’ll probably need to work this out early in 2009.
• We have not managed to increase our development community in a significant way. I’m actually very concerned about this one, because right now the 3,75 people that Sun Microsystems has assigned to the project (2 full-time developers, 1 full-time QA engineer, 1 part-time (50%) build engineer, 1 part-time (25%) user experience lead) do most of the work in the project. That is not bad in itself, but looking at it from a medium- to long-term perspective, we really need to work much harder on attracting new talent to the project to place it on a much more solid foundation. We’ve started some efforts with regards to that in 2008 with (hopefully) improved communication activities between the core team and the community, but we obviously need to do much more in 2009 to make a significant change happen.

That is my perspective on 2008. I would be interested in hearing your take on the Up’s and Down’s of our project in 2008. Until that I wish everyone of our blog readers a happy new year 2009!

We need great t-shirts!

Dear designers, we now have a great new community store, where anyone can upload designs, and t-shirts come out the other end.

We would really appreciate it, if you could help us with some cool designs for Sunbird-wear or Lightning-wear.