I would like to point you to an interview that Louis Suárez-Potts, chair and secretary of the OpenOffice.org community council, held with Stephan Schaefer, the lead developer from Sun who is leading Sun’s efforts on improving Lightning. It gives a good overview on the background and future plans of Sun’s involvement.
http://www.openoffice.org/editorial/mozilla_lightning_and_OOo.html
Well, it’s been quite a while since our last status update. Since the last update on the 30th of September we have released Sunbird and Lightning 0.3 and everyone was pretty exhausted after the release crunch. But now almost everybody is back on board and we’re going with full steam towards the 0.5 release, which we are currently planning to release in January. So here’s the (quite long) list of fixed bugs since the last status update:
A big ‘Thank you’ goes out to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters.
The Mozilla Calendar Project is pleased to announce the release of
Sunbird and Lightning 0.3.
Thanks to the hard work of our localizers, both Sunbird and Lightning
are available immediately in 17 different locales.
To download either of these, please visit
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
Do read the release notes before installing and using this software, as
there are some gotchas that you need to be aware of.
Sunbird Release Notes:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/releases/sunbird0.3.html
Lightning Release Notes:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/releases/lightning0.3.html
Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers,
testers, and supporters. We would not be able to do this without your
assistance!
-lilmatt, for the MozCal team
The second release candidate builds for Sunbird and Lightning 0.3 are now available.
Key things to know about these bits:
We’d love all the help we can get ensuring that we know about all the important bugs. Please download and file bugs in Bugzilla (or, if in doubt, ask in #calendar-qa on IRC).
Hi folks,
I have some really good news to share with you.
It’s been officially confirmed by Michael Bemmer, Engineering Director at Sun Microsystems, on the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2006) that Sun is contributing significantly to the Lightning Project to provide users with an alternative open source choice by combining OpenOffice.org respectively StarOffice and Thunderbird/Lightning.
You can find the details on slides 16-19 of Michael’s presentation or watch his presentation on video (you need the ogg theora codec to watch the video).
Of course the development team is pretty excited about this, even though we were aware of this for some time already, as Sun has already contributed a lot of development effort to Lightning and Sunbird.
Please join me in welcoming the Sun developers into our community.
The first release candidate builds for Sunbird and Lightning 0.3 are now available.
Key things to know about these bits:
* Windows Sunbird users should be sure to remove any old installation of Sunbird before starting the 0.3RC1 installer. This (bug 355255) will be fixed in 0.3RC2.
* No localizations are currently available. This will change for 0.3RC2 and/or final.
* The release notes are still a work in progress; however it is believed that they contain most of the important information. Please read them carefully before installing: Sunbird Release Notes, Lightning Release Notes.
We’d love all the help we can get ensuring that we know about all the important bugs. Please download and file bugs in Bugzilla (or, if in doubt, ask in #calendar-qa on IRC): Sunbird, Lightning.
Hey folks,
I’m very sorry for not updating this blog earlier, but we were so busy in getting the 0.3 release in a decent shape, that I simply forgot to do it. As you can see from the list of fixed bugs that follows, the developers have been working very hard on getting the builds ready for release and we’re very near (probably within the next 2-3 days) to a first release candidate, which can then be tested on our Calendar test day (see the previous post).
So here’s the (quite long) list of fixed bugs since the last status update:
Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. We would not be able to do this without your assistance!
Sorry for the late update, guys. Everyone is hard at work on the 0.3 release, as you can see by the tons of fixes, that came in in the last three weeks. We’re pretty confident that we can release in September, so stay tuned for more happiness. Again thanks to everyone who’s filed bugs, submitted patches, and done QA or reviews. The following bugs have had patches checked in since the last update:
For those of you who didn’t already know, I was hired this summer as a full-time intern at Mozilla Corp. While I did a bit of Firefox 2 work, I was fortunate to be able to spend most of my time on Calendar bugs. Since tomorrow is my last day in Mountain View before heading off to law school, I wanted to express a few words of thanks.
If there’s one thing this summer has taught me, it’s the importance of working with the right group of people. Mozilla has done a fantastic job of assembling a group of incredibly brilliant people who are each passionate about what they’re doing. Because of this, there was never a dull day around the office. I’d like to thank everyone in Mountain View for that.
Being able to spend so much time on the Calendar project has also given me great insight into just how big of an effort this is. There is much more to this project besides writing code and fixing bugs. This summer I’ve found myself doing everything from roadmapping to meeting planning to QA to release driving to community building. For helping me along with these tasks, I’d like to explictly thank Dan Mosedale, Mike Connor, Mike Shaver, and Mike Beltzner.
Seeing the true scale of the Calendar project helped me realize more than anything just how important the community we have is. The phenomenal responses we received to the QA days is just the most visible sign of this. Less obvious, but just as crucial are the daily bug-filers, testers, and forum posters who help make Sunbird and Lightning better. So, in closing, I’d like to thank everyone who’s involved in this project, or even shown interest in it, for the little (and not so little) bits you’ve contributed.
Rest assured that this is not the end of my work with the Calendar project. I’m more convinced than ever that there are extremely interesting problems to be solved in this space and I want to be involved in finding those solutions. Until I have a better handle on what sort of time commitments law school will require of me, however, I can’t make any promises of time.
For now, though, thanks to everyone for everything. It has been a fantastic summer.
We’re closing in on 0.3, and lots of good fixes are landing. Thanks to everyone who’s filed bugs, submitted patches, and done QA or reviews. The following bugs have had patches checked in since the last update:
*Note: Printing in Lightning hasn’t been turned on yet, but these fixes will also apply to it, once that is done.