QA / Sunbird — Comments Off on Sunbird gets a facelift
23
Dec 05

Sunbird gets a facelift

Those of you that have been following Sunbird development closely have probably heard some mention of the ‘new views’. This refers to a set of xml files that create a new set of day/week and month views. Lightning has already been using these files, but in order to make them usable in Sunbird substantial changes needed to be made to the current codebase. The entire team has been putting in a lot of work on Bug 297934 in order to accomplish this. This afternoon, they landed.

We need your help

These changes were far too big to do perfectly. Tomorrow’s build, which will include the new views, will be very buggy. Many of the bugs have already been anticipated and filed. However, many others likely remain unknown. Those interested in testing these new views can help out greatly by providing specific, reproducable bug reports. Please do NOT comment about the regressions in the new-views bug. We are tracking all of the regressions from this landing in Bug 321164. If you find another regression, please file the bug and make it block this tracking bug.

New hackers

With the landing of these new views, now might be a good time for anyone who has considered trying their hand at hacking calendar code to jump in. Some of the regressions created by this bug will be rather difficult, but others will make for very good first bugs. Those interested in helping out may find the following (works-in-progress) pages useful:

Please be patient with us as we try to iron out all the problems from this landing. In the end, it should make your Sunbird experience much better. For instance, the day and week views already offer one of the most requested features, inline-editing. Also, in these views, dragging and dropping is back. Landing these views also allows the Lightning and Sunbird development processes to be much more united, so hopefully they will move more quickly.

Happy testing and Happy Holidays!

Lightning / Sunbird — 7 comments
13
Dec 05

Status Update (Dec 13)

The following bugs have been fixed in Lightning, Sunbird and/or the Calendar extension, since the last update:

  • Bug 273251: (All three) Make print preview window title localizable
  • Bug 317477: (Lightning) Canceling ‘Edit Event’ dialog opens ‘New Event’ dialog
  • Bug 317868: (All three) minimonth and timepicker should be scrollable
  • Bug 319344: (Extension) hPrefWindow is called as a function, but is an object
  • Bug 319367: (All three) time picker in new event shows twice :57 (minutes)
  • Bug 319426: (Sunbird) Remove empty style rules
  • Bug 319561: (All three) ‘Home’-calendar name not localizable
  • Bug 319681: (Sunbird/Extension) Can’t delete location, description, etc from events
  • Bug 319730: (Sunbird/Extension) No events found if a string typed into the search bar contains upper-case letters

No known regressions exist in Lightning, Sunbird and/or the Calendar extension at the moment.

There are no known regressions from Sunbird 0.3a1.

Lightning / Sunbird — 4 comments
04
Dec 05

Status update (4 Dec)

The following bugs have been fixed in Lightning and/or Sunbird, since the last update:

  • Bug 310221 – (both) icalendar items with a duration and no dtend are handled incorrectly
  • Bug 315954 – (Lightning) Day/Week views fail to display events at the end of the display range
  • Bug 318850 – (Lightning) Make core calendar code work against both trunk and 1.8 branch builds
  • Bug 315960 – (both) Add a compare method to calIDuration
  • Bug 317135 – (Sunbird) Completed tasks are sometimes shown as uncompleted
  • Bug 303379 – (both) Localization entry for likelyTimezone is unclear to localizers
  • Bug 318232 – (both) Minimonth header for February displays ‘March’ when today’s date is after the 28th of the month
  • Bug 317473 – (Lightning) For new events no calendar is chosen by default in ‘New Event’ dialog
  • Bug 317588 – (both) Update tasks to use the new .valueAsIcalString parameter
  • Bug 317864 – (both) Update remaining consumers of .stringValue parameter to new .valueAsIcalString parameter
  • Bug 316275 – (Sunbird) New high quality icon for Sunbird
  • Bug 309426 – (Lightning) Double clicking on agenda/calendar items should open the edit-dialog

The following regression still remains in Lightning:

  • Bug 317477 – (since 21 Nov) Canceling ‘Edit Event’ dialog from double-clicking also opens ‘New Event’ dialog

There are no known regressions from Sunbird 0.3a1.

Lightning / Sunbird — 5 comments
22
Nov 05

Status update (22 Nov)

It’s been a busy week in the Calendar world. I’m breaking things up by whether they were a fix for Lightning, for Sunbird or for both. Note, however, that some of the fixes for one will end up in the other at some point in the future as well. So, without further ado, here are the recently fixed bugs:

  • Bug 307948 – (both) Handle escaped characters (‘,’ , ‘/’ , ‘;’ , etc) properly
  • Bug 315960 – (Lightning) Speed up the time it takes to draw day and week views
  • Bug 315760 – (Sunbird) The title of the ‘Go to Today’ and ‘Go to Date’ is slightly wrong
  • Bug 316761 – (both) Update calls to the new storage provider api
  • Bug 315731 – (both) The ‘Next’ button in the calendar creation wizard isn’t always enabled properly
  • Bug 316756 – (Sunbird) The ‘HTML’ option is listed twice in the export menu
  • Bug 317119 – (both) Localization cleanup
  • Bug 314506 – (Sunbird) Create a chrome.manifest file for shipping with Sunbird
  • Bug 316791 – (Lightning) Events sometimes remain collapsed in week or day views
  • Bug 298504 – (Lightning) Create context menus for the views
  • Bug 309734 – (Lightning) Double clicking on a day in the views should bring up the ‘New Event’ dialog

Recent Lightning regressions:

  • Bug 317477 – (since yesterday) Canceling ‘Edit Event’ dialog from double-clicking also opens ‘New Event’ dialog
  • Bug 317473 – (since 21 Oct) Mouse cursor remains as an hour-glass after canceling ‘New Event’ dialog

Note: Both of these bugs, especially the first, would make good ‘first bugs’ if people were interested in getting their feet wet with the project.

There are no known regressions in Sunbird since 0.3a1.

Project Updates — 13 comments
21
Nov 05

The Calendar extension’s status

Ever since Sunbird 0.3a1 was released, and even before, there has been a constant current of questions regarding the status of the Calendar extension for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla Suite/SeaMonkey. These questions have, for the most part, all had the general form “Are you going to update the Calendar extension as well?”

To begin with, throughout the development of Sunbird 0.3a1, all of the code for the Calendar extension was maintained, and changes and improvements made to Sunbird were also made to Calendar. At this point, anyone who wants to ought to be able to create an 0.3a1 equivalent version of the Calendar extension for their own use. You can follow the directions at the project page to do so.

The next logical question, of course, is “Why are there no new public versions of the Calendar extension available?” The short answer to this is ‘resources’. It should come as no surprise that the project simply does not have the same resources of say, Firefox. We have a very small set of build machines that are currently being forced to do double-duty, also building Lightning. Attempting to make these machines also build Calendar simply is not possible. It takes away too many build cycles.

The other main resource we’re lacking is manpower. Although the Calendar extension and Sunbird share a large majority of the code, there are still differences between them. Before we could even consider releasing an updated version of the Calendar extension, it would need to be thoroughly tested, on each of the 3 main platforms, in each of the 3 programs. (That’s 9 different, complex test sets.) After that, there would be the additional strain on the development team to triage bug reports that came in, to determine whether they were Calendar specific, or also applied to Sunbird (or to Sunbird and Lightning). Our development team is fairly small
so adding this additional burden would delay future releases of Sunbird and Lightning.

To conclude, development on the Calendar extension has continued alongside Sunbird development. Currently, if you don’t have the ability to build Mozilla projects on your own, Sunbird is your best option. Furthermore, it is important to note that the future of the Calendar extension really is Lightning. (Sunbird will, of course, be the future stand-alone.) In the short-term, we’re working hard to make Lightning compatible with Thunderbird 1.5. We do recognize that the current situation, having no updated Calendar extension for the 1.5 version of Thunderbird, leaves our users in a difficult position. Hopefully, this explanation has helped to elucidate why there really is no other option. Until such time as we can sort out the remaining obstacles for Lightning in TB 1.5, users who have upgraded from TB 1.0.7 are encouraged to use Sunbird.

Lightning / Sunbird — 11 comments
14
Nov 05

Status update

Now that we finally got 0.3a1 out the door, several of the bugs that had patches pending were able to land. These, and other fixes since the release are now included in the latest nightly builds:

  • Bug 298348 – Make Lightning localizable
  • Bug 307749 – Don’t build the .xpi when building Sunbird
  • Bug 315137 – Fix for hard-coded string in calendarProperties.xul
  • Bug 313660 – Fix for Javascript Strict Warning in unifinderToDo.js
  • Bug 314345 – Events and tasks still seen if all calendars is deselected
  • Bug 314934 – Ctrl+z/Ctrl+Y don’t work for undo/redo
  • Bug 315916 – Alarm popups entity error
  • Bug 220694 – Show item’s location in the alarm dialog
  • Bug 315908 – Cannot change alarm values for a task
  • Bug 315930 – ‘Publish Entire Calendar’ does not publish tasks
  • Bug 267160 – ‘Visit URL’ button doesn’t work in sunbird
  • Bug 315373 – Help -> Release notes is greyed out
  • Bug 315492 – Localization cleanup

There are no known regressions since 0.3a1.
Thanks as always goes out to our testing community for identifying and filing these and other bug reports.

Localization / Sunbird — 4 comments
08
Nov 05

Sunbird all around the world

It’s only been four days, since we released Sunbird 0.3 alpha1 and thanks to the Mozilla L10n community we already have four localizations (French, German, Polish and Slovenian) available for download.

If you want to be part of this and would like to provide a localization for Sunbird 0.3 alpha1 you can follow the instructions on the wiki. If you need more help on this, there are helpful people in the netscape.public.mozilla.l10n newsgroup, which can help you.

If you have builds for the different platform ready, please post the URLs to these builds in a comment to this blog post and I’ll add them to the l10n download page shortly after that.

Sunbird — 9 comments
04
Nov 05

Releasing is hard

You might have noticed some delay in releasing Sunbird 0.3a1. There were some problems on the road, like lack of time, the tree being broken at the wrong moment, cvs acting weird, last-minute bugs etc. But it’s done now. Builds are up at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/sunbird/releases/0.3a1/, there are release notes and there even is a cvs tag (SUNBIRD_0_3a1_RELEASE)
Of course this is still an alpha build. There are problems, lots of them. We know about that. But we also have more changes ahead, and didn’t want to delay the release any further. Please take that into account when testing and using 0.3a1.
The biggest change since 0.2 is a complete rewrite of the backend. It is now possible to plug in new calendar providers (code that stores the calendar data in some file or database). We already have an ICS provider, a SQLite provider, and the beginnings of a CalDAV provider, and we expect others will come with time (let us know if you want to implement one). Writing a new backend isn’t easy, so it took some time. But we think it was worth it. It gives the possibilty to do real cool things.
The upcoming changes include a rewrite of the calendar views, improved performance, backend improvements and much more. Stay tuned!

Sunbird — 3 comments
04
Nov 05

Where is 0.3 alpha1

Just a short post to keep you guys updated on the current situation.

Very late in the game of releasing Sunbird 0.3 alpha1, we were hit by bug 306834, which resulted in Sunbird using 100% of the CPU cycles, even when the application was doing nothing. The reason behind this behaviour is bug 291386, which we needed to workaround. We will test our workaround patch extensively and hope to release Sunbird 0.3 alpha1 in the next few days if all works out.

Sunbird — 8 comments
31
Oct 05

Last minute testing needed for upcoming Sunbird 0.3alpha1 release

OK guys, we’re nearly there. I know it has been a long time since our last official release (Sunbird 0.2) but the developers think that what we have right now could become Sunbird 0.3alpha1.

Please be aware that this release is an alpha release. This means that you shouldn’t expect the same quality as from a final release (like Sunbird 0.2). Sunbird 0.3alpha1 should be better in a few spots than Sunbird 0.2 but in some other spots it is probably only 90% as good as Sunbird 0.2.

But before we release, we could use some help in testing the latest nightly builds for any showstopper bugs. Showstopper bugs for this release would be all serious crashes or dataloss issues.

So please hop over to the mozilla FTP server, get a build and test it until your fingers bleed :-)

If you find something that may qualify as a crash bug or a dataloss issue, please put the following info in your bug report on bugzilla.mozilla.org:

  1. Clear steps to reproduce. (if necessary attach an .ics file that shows the issue to the bug)
  2. The version of Sunbird that you’re using and the platform that you’re using it on. This info can be gained via Help -> About Mozilla Sunbird

Thanks for your help!

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