23
Jun 09

String freeze for the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 1.0beta release on June 23 [UPDATE]

I’m sorry, but I totally forgot to tell, that we currently expect to have the 1.0 beta release ready in about four (4) weeks from now. So that should hopefully give every localizer enough time, who have not been following our checkins on a daily or weekly basis.
I’ll inform you as soon as I know about a definitive code freeze and release date.


22
Jun 09

String freeze for the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 1.0beta release on June 23

It’s been a long time, but it seems that we’re finally getting near to a new release. Yay!

Philipp tells me, that we now have only five open bugs on the blocking list that are needed for the 1.0 beta release. All of those bugs have no localization impact, which means that we are ready for a string freeze.

We will therefore freeze all application strings by tomorrow, Wednesday, June 23 at 23:59 PST. That means that all strings will then be entirely frozen until we release Lightning and Sunbird 1.0beta. I will open up a separate opt-in thread for localizers in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup soon.

One additional note to localizers:
Please take a close look at the status of your tinderbox (at http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=Mozilla-l10n-locale where “locale” must be replaced with your locale code (e.g. es-ES or de). I’ve seen some locales having a red Windows tinderbox (and therefore broken Windows builds), because those locales didn’t follow this change to our installer strings. Please check if this applies to you and make the necessary changes.


27
Mar 09

Heading towards Calendar 1.0 Beta 1

The original plan regarding Thunderbird 3 Beta 2 was to release a beta of Sunbird/Lightning that fits together well. Due to other obligations this goal has slipped quite a bit. We have tagged the list of blocking bugs by bugs needed for the beta and those we can move into the next beta.

Currently, there is only one bug left that we really need to solve for this beta. It has a preliminary patch and will require string changes. Unfortunately, the mentioned bug is not quite trivial, since a lot of UI changes need to be done and we haven’t quite agreed on some aspects.

This means we will announce a string freeze as soon as the bug has been fixed and release 2 weeks afterwards, or sooner if all strings have been translated earlier.

Nevertheless, we’d like to provide a beta as soon as possible. To help make this possible what we need most at the moment is testing! Please download Thunderbird 3 Beta 2 at:

http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/3.0b2/

And our latest nightly version of Lightning:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-central/

Be sure to back up your data before using this version, since it upgrades your local storage database. Downgrading is not easily possible afterwards without creating a new profile.

IMPORTANT:Note however as we’ve announced in an earlier blog post this will be the last release for the time being that includes Sunbird. This means that now more than ever, testing is needed to make sure that Sunbird doesn’t contain any critical bugs.

If you want future Sunbird releases to happen and either have experience with the Mozilla build architecture or are willing to learn, please do send me an Email and I’ll send you some information to get you started.

We will make an effort towards releasing more beta versions of Lightning on the road towards 1.0 to make sure the next release will be as bug-free as possible and still contain the nice new features we have been working on. Remember that we need you to fulfill this goal! Without your valuable testing, we will surely be up for a surprise in case a critical bug has made it into the final version without notice.


18
Feb 09

Calendar Project at a critical juncture

The Calendar project, which for several years has been working on the Lightning add-on to Thunderbird and the standalone Sunbird project, is at a critical juncture. We feel it’s important to communicate this to our users and contributor community, as your input will determine how the project continues.
Recently, several contributors who were working on the project full-time have left the project or have shifted to free-time contributor status due to other obligations. This means their contributions will be limited to their spare time, which is quite sparse given a full-time job and family. This is a significant change from recent years, and if no new contributors come on board, it means that the rate of change will decrease dramatically. Our releases will necessarily have to become less frequent, and the amount of bug fixes and new features per release will decrease.
As a result of this, we have to take stock, and figure out how we’re going to go forward.
First, as much as it pains us, we have decided to step back from Sunbird maintenance. Our next release will include Sunbird, but subsequent releases won’t unless new contributors take on the work. Trying to support both takes too much time, so we had to make a painful prioritization decision.
Second, our next major goal is to have a version of Lightning that will work well with Thunderbird 3. Lightning won’t be built-in to Thunderbird 3 for a variety of reasons (see this post by David Ascher for more on the topic), but we’re still on track to have a release that gives users of Thunderbird 2 & Lightning a migration path. That version will be a significant upgrade from Lightning 0.9, including notable performance and usability improvements.
There’s a lot of work to do to reach our goals, and as a result we’re not yet planning much beyond that. This is where we need your input, both in terms of direction-setting — given limited resources, where should we focus and why? and in terms of more directly useful help — if you’ve been using Lightning for a while, and know a bit about mozilla technologies (any of XUL, JavaScript, CSS), or want to help test, write documentation, or do something else not listed here — get in touch!
This is really a tremendous opportunity for anyone who is interested and willing to help make a difference here for the project and its hundreds of thousands of users — get involved!
I hope to hear more from you soon!
Philipp Kewisch (Calendar Project – lead developer)


06
Jan 09

Date range added to holiday calendars – Help needed to update outdated holiday calendars

Yesterday I finally managed something that I’ve been basically planning to do f or years: Fixing bug 456938.

As you can see from the updated holiday calendar page on our website, every holiday calendar is now annotated with its duration of validity. That will hopefully reduce the frustration that some of our users have felt, when they subscribed themselves to an outdated holiday calendar in the past. It will also make things much more easier for me to maintain the holiday calendar page in the future by enabling me to quickly determine whether a holiday calendar is still valid or not.

However the downside of this exercise has been that (as of the time of writing) I’ve identified 27 holiday calendars, which are outdated. I’ve removed those calendars from the holiday calendar page for now, but the old files are still in place so as to not deliberately break people, who have subscribed to them.

My plan right now is to delete the outdated files after a period of 2-3 months if no update materializes. It would be great if our community could step in here and provide updates for the remaining outdated holiday calendars.

It would also be great to get holiday calendars for those countries that aren’t currently listed either on the holiday calendar page or the outdated holiday calendar buglist.


03
Nov 08

Updates to the l10n dashboard

A few weeks after we had initially set up an l10n dashboard for Calendar, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey localization, Axel Hecht (Pike) managed to import the Calendar, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey trees into the main l10n dashboard as well.
We have let these two dashboards run in parallel for the last few weeks, but in the end, it didn’t make any sense to have two dashboards for the same thing. We have therefore retired the Mozilla Messaging l10n dashboard and redirected all calls to it to the mozilla.org l10n dashboard. Please use the mozilla.org dashboard exclusively from now on.
To make you more familiar with the various options, that the dashboard provides, I’ve written up a short guide to its various functions on the mozilla.org wiki. I’d appreciate feedback on this guide.


23
Oct 08

Meeting minutes of the Calendar developer status call (2008-10-22)

  • Participants: mschroeder, dbo, clarkbw, sipaq, fallen
  • Simon (sipaq):
    • sent email to gozer about l10n builds for trunk: gozer mentioned pretty near to l10n builds for sunbird, lightning more complicated. Localizers keep on asking sipaq about localized builds
    • L10n work on Thunderbird, finding unused strings.
  • Martin (mschroeder):
    • done some cleanup recently, removed gCalendarWindow
    • litmus test case cleanup with Andreas
  • Daniel (dbo):
    • has been left sick most of the week, but started working again yesterday
    • more on iTIP overhaul
    • some investigations into recent tb/ltn crasher
    • thinks about a parentless occurrences solution
  • Bryan (clarkbw):
  • Philipp (fallen):
    • getting rid of the toolbar items, either just removing or replacing them
    • posted bugs about what needs to be discussed
    • everything P1 that’s in work
    • probably after barcelona: unifinder tied to gloda/exptoolbar
  • Simon reminds of blogging!
    • Daniel will try to write something up on the iTIP overhaul
    • Philipp will try to blog about the toolbar work or on integrating into gloda
    • Martin will come up with a topic by the weekend

02
Oct 08

L10n dashboard now available to Calendar localizers as well

Thanks to gozer, Mozilla Messaging’s build guru, we now have a working l10n dashboard for the calendar localizations. Localizers, who also do l10n work for Firefox or Thunderbird should already be familiar with the dashboard, for the others here’s a quick explanation of the dashboard table:

  • Locale: The locale code for each calendar locale
  • Tree: The tree ID, the Mozilla Messaging dashboard currently knows two trees:
    • tb3x: Information on the localization status of the Thunderbird localization of a given locale
    • cal3x: Information on the localization status of the Sunbird/Lightning localization of a given locale
  • %: Percentage of completion of a locale (Please note, that this will probably never reach 100%, because there are some strings in each localization which shouldn’t be translated)
  • Errors: Number of localization errors
  • Missing: Number of missing strings
  • Unchanged: Number of unchanged strings excl. access- and commandkeys (this relates to the % number mentioned above)
  • Stats: Graphical history of locale status (H) and compare-locales output (C)
  • Status: Graphical indicator for the current state of the localization

I hope this helps our localizers in working even more effectively than they have already done in the past (if that’s even possible). Thanks again, gozer!


19
Sep 08

Lightning/Sunbird 0.9 RC2 is out!

The second release candidate (RC2) of our 0.9 release is available! We really think that this is it. If nothing serious shows up during the next few days, this RC will become the 0.9 final release. Here are the links:

The Lightning builds contain all available locales (30). To download a localized Sunbird build, you’ll need adjust the link and replace the “en-US” string with the locale code of your locale, e.g. “ko” for Korean.

Here are the fixes that went into this 2nd RC:

  • Bug 416195: Selected calendar not highlighted in import and export
  • Bug 454664: Events not displayed after opening ics file
  • Bug 454691: Exception occuring when multiple transactions are occuring
  • Bug 454757: Wrong usage of this/thisCalendar
  • Bug 454983: Error when editing repeating event with exceptions
  • Bug 454998: Free/Busy lookups don’t work
  • Bug 455049: Toggling offline results in uncaught exception
  • Bug 455128: Exception on cached caldav calendars
  • Bug 455130: Potential transaction mismatch between sqlite databases
  • Bug 455132: Pasting event to disabled calendar deletes all events
  • Bug 455133: Dragging repeating event to the date of a previous deletion deletes it too
  • Bug 455182: Problems refreshing multiple Digest-authed CalDAV calendars
  • Bug 455232: Egroupware installation gives error when querying for tasks
  • Bug 455289: Offer WCAP experimental caching
  • Bug 455298: Impossible to load remote caldav
  • Bug 455462: Hovering over event in week view causes visual bug

22
Aug 08

[August 22, 2008] Lightning/Sunbird Status Update

We’re getting nearer and nearer to our first 0.9 release candidate. With 31 bugs fixed in the last 10 days, many of them release blockers, we’re now down to only 11 release blockers at the time of writing. 8 of those 11 bugs currently still need a patch, so if anyone of our readers wants to help out, now would be a great time.

On the localization front it looks like the Macedonian and Turkish localizations will not be able to make it, but Slovenian will, so we’ll still be in better shape l10n-wise than we were during the time of the 0.8 release.

For anyone interested, here are the 31 bugs fixed within in the last 10 days:

  • Bug 316927
    Fix dataloss, when importing events/tasks with multiple categories
  • Bug 405222
    Time format not respected in prefs window
  • Bug 406581
    Enhance cal::detectTimezone() to dump errors
  • Bug 409921
    Implement CalDAV scheduling
  • Bug 417629
    Import ICS file to CalDAV server fails to handle recurrence-id correctly
  • Bug 435447
    Today pane events don’t change color when calendar color is changed
  • Bug 444532
    Select ‘Convert to->Task/event’ in the preview pane in mailmode causes an uncaught exception
  • Bug 447996
    Month View doesn’t display the full month anymore
  • Bug 448205
    Calendar mode does not set Thunderbird Application title (regression)
  • Bug 448561
    Allow CalDAV provider to work with Google Calendar’s new CalDAV
  • Bug 448771
    Open task context menu in calendar view -> output in error console
  • Bug 448946
    Switching calendar views via keys ALT+[1-4] is broken
  • Bug 449019
    Mouse over event in unifinder
  • Bug 449401
    Storage provider does cleanly separate items of the same id across different calendars
  • Bug 449573
    Deleting item/items from local ics file fails with MODIFICATION_FAILED, items missing
  • Bug 450107
    View -> Tasks in View command behaves erratic in Month view
  • Bug 450285
    Startup Error: mozStorage exception: createStatement failed (regression)
  • Bug 450381
    Itip email are not sent while being offline
  • Bug 450398
    Add Icelandic (is) and Chinese Traditional (zh-TW) to shipped-locales
  • Bug 450447
    Remove pa-IN (Punjabi) and mn (Mongolian) from all-locales
  • Bug 450451
    Remove mk (Macedonian) and tr (Turkish) from shipped-locales
  • Bug 450611
    Add space between icon and button text in occurrence selection dialog
  • Bug 451020
    Support for mixed server/non-server attendees
  • Bug 451162
    Organizer’s email address isn’t in iMIP invitation request
  • Bug 451174
    CalDAV provider can fail to check inbox
  • Bug 451327
    Move mouse to the unifinder, but not over an event -> error output
  • Bug 451353
    Emphasize open/unanswered invitations
  • Bug 451383
    Tooltips are not updated and display wrong information (regression)
  • Bug 451455
    CalDAV provider can delete items mistakenly
  • Bug 451529
    Deleting invitation copy sends out CANCEL to all attendees
  • Bug 451539
    Recurring items and attachments

Many thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that make this possible.