Uncategorized — 14 comments
20
Oct 11

Annoyances Wrapup

Thank you very much for the feedback on my last blog post. I’d like to give a short wrap-up and comment on some of the mentioned annoyances.

  • Multiple Password Prompts – Sorry, this one isn’t trivial to solve. The issue lies somewhere in the Mozilla Platform and how we interact with it.
  • Send Reminder via Email – This means you need to have Thunderbird running for it to send you an email. Is that really what you want?
  • Move Lightning’s tab in front of inbox/Tab closing order – More of a Thunderbird issue. You might want to watch bug 508776
  • Invitations with Provider for Google Calendar – I have a possible fix for this, I’ll see that this makes the next release (bug 684482)
  • Descriptive Errors on Failure – This means string changes, which we can’t do this late in the cycle. We did add some debug messages for the ics provider though
  • Disappearing Calendars – Unfortunately I haven’t been able to reproduce this issue, so its hard for me to actually fix it
  • Editing invitation email – This needs some Thunderbird changes which are not part of Thunderbird 8. Maybe for Thunderbird 9 though!
  • Alarms showing multiple times – I’ll take another look into this bug, I thought I got rid of that for the last release!
  • Failures Dismissing recurring events – We’re doing our best to fix this bug for the release
  • Offline Support – Well, that’s not exactly very small….but on the bright side, this was planned already! Support has landed and will be part of 1.0rc2, which is due very soon (today, tomorrow)
  • Flickering in the views – I agree this is a very annoying bug. Unfortunately its not trivial to fix and requires massive changes in the views and/or backend architecture. As much as I’d like to make it a part of 1.0, I doubt its reasonable.
  • Snoozed alarm fires at old event time – Yes, working on this!
  • New Calendar Wizard – While a lot of work was done in the Summer of Code, this is not quite ready yet. The Student is still in contact with me though and is working on fixing the remaining issues
  • Dual Boot – Until certain platform issues are fixed, this is not feasible, sorry
  • Copy entire recurring event – We need some good UI for this, how would we know if the user wants to move the master or just an occurrence?
  • Multiday scrolling issues – I’ll look into this and see what I can do
  • Events being an hour off on DST change – I’ll also take a look here
  • Import/Export issues – This isn’t much of a focus for 1.0, but if its an easy fix I’m happy to consider
  • text/plain on caldav – I can imagine allowing this might cause issues for items that are really just text/plain, i.e documents uploaded to the same collection. This would cause an error message for those events. Can’t this be fixed on the server side?
  • Hooks/Refresh Killer – Refresh Killer is already in, Mohit is working on the hooks patch, which will make it in too.

I’ll do my best to round off these edges to make 1.0 the best Lightning release you’ve seen to date!

Uncategorized — 45 comments
15
Oct 11

What do you think is the most annoying bug in Lightning?

In anticipation of 1.0, I’d like to ask you what bug you find most annoying in Lightning. Our goal is to round the edges, so please focus on small issues (negative example: Missing local mobile device sync) and try to keep it down to one (I’ll also go with two, but don’t start copying our whole buglist ;-).

Comments welcome, lets get this rolling!

Uncategorized — Comments Off on Locale Trees for Lightning 1.0 and Beyond
11
Oct 11

Locale Trees for Lightning 1.0 and Beyond

I’d like to announce our plans for the localization of Lightning for 1.0 and beyond. I’ve done my best to make the process as little work for the localizers as possible, so please excuse if the naming and repos don’t currently match whats usual for Firefox and Thunderbird. I promise this will change for the following releases though.

Lightning 1.0

First of all, lets focus on Lightning 1.0 which is due November 8th. As with the last two releases, we will be using l10n-miramar. The main reason for this is that we’ve taken great care to not change any strings for 1.0b7 and the upcoming 1.0 release. Note however, the tree to compare with is not comm-miramar, but rather comm-beta. This may be a bit confusing, but be assured this name clash will go away after the release. Currently, 38 locales are green and only 11 are red. I would love to see a few more locales going green for 1.0. How about it? According to the current state of the l10n dashboard, here’s a list of the missing locales. Maybe you can help out? If so, please click on the links below and contact the team leaders there:

If you already localize for any of these locales and you know everything is translated, please request sign-off again to make sure it shows up as green on the dashboard.

Lightning next

The following information is not relevant for Lightning 1.0. We haven’t agreed on version numbers, but we do have l10n trees and will be leaving l10n-miramar after the release. Given Lightning has a binary component and needs to re-release every time that Thunderbird does, it makes sense for us get aboard the release train too. You can see the l10n trees here:

If you have any questions, please do let me know via comment or email.

Uncategorized — 6 comments
07
Oct 11

Lightning 1.0rc1 is available

The Calendar Team is happy to present Lightning 1.0rc1. This build requires Thunderbird 8 and is the first of a few release candidates we will be publishing on the road to Lightning 1.0.

During the previous releases there was often only a week or two between the first rc and final release. To make sure there are no unpleasant surprises there will be much more time (and more release candidates) for testing this time around. The scheduled release date for Lightning 1.0 is November 8th, which gives us time for 3-4 release candidates.

The rc1 release, and this is a first, is availble on addons.mozilla.org. We are now making use of the development channel feature, so head on over to addons.mozilla.org and click on the “Development Channel” box. Once you’ve installed this build, you will automatically get updates to future release candidates.

We are almost there, please do report any bugs you find on bugzilla.mozilla.org or use the newsgroups.

Project Updates — 9 comments
27
Sep 11

Lightning 1.0b7 released

I am happy to present you Lightning 1.0b7, our stable release compatible with Thunderbird 7. This is the first release in a long time that has been created using release automation. While it took a bit longer to set up this time, we hope that its very easy to produce subsequent builds with it, leaving more time for actual coding instead of release engineering work.

Lightning 1.0b7 contains 39 fixes to the last release, which was two months back. You can find a full list of changes here.

You can get the release from addons.mozilla.org for all platforms.

Note this is the last release before Lightning 1.0, which is due in 6 weeks, so please be sure to report all bugs you find on our bugtracker at bugzilla.mozilla.org (please search before you file a bug).

If you are using a localized version, please also report localization errors in the respective locale here.

A short note on the release process for 1.0, we will be releasing a number of release candidates that will become the final builds. I’ll do an extra blog post on this soon.

Lightning / Project Updates — 15 comments
14
Sep 11

Plans for the next release

Plans for the next release

Its about time to give you an update on what is planned for the next release. As you may have noticed, we have had a lot of trouble calling our releases “beta”. For one thing, some users and especially corporate users are cautious when they read beta and don’t see that it has the same quality as all our other releases. Aside from that we also had trouble with uploading releases to addons.mozilla.org (they are automatically marked beta and require admin intervention to make them public for everyone) and we are constantly in need of new sub-version numbers. For example, if we want to release a matching build for Thunderbird 7.0b2, what do we call it? Lightning 1.0 beta 7 beta 1? Thats too much, do you agree?

To relieve that issue we’re going to bite the bullet and call either our next release or the one after 1.0. Afterwards we can newly decide on version numbers and I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not going to go into the version number trap again. If at some point the next available version number is 2.0, then that’s the way it is.

What this means for Localizers?

We have taken great care to avoid patches with string changes for the next release. Therefore as it is right now, if you have all strings translated for Lightning 1.0b5, then you are good to go for the next release.

According to the l10n dashboard, there are 13 locales with missing strings. This information is quite old so a lot may have changed in between, but it would be splendid if all of the remaining locales could have their strings translated. I will be contacting the localizers personally to make sure things progress

Update: Likely the l10n builds are not working yet. I’ll also post here and in mozilla.dev.l10n when that is fixed!

What this means for you?

For you? Yes, for you! We need help testing Lightning to make sure there are no unpleasant surprises in the next two weeks. Now you’ll surely want to know where to get a build compatible with Thunderbird 7.0 Betas. Unfortunately I must admit, this is not quite ready yet. Our goal is to automate the release process a bit more, otherwise at least a day of my time is taken just for producing a full set of release (candidate) builds. It may easily happen that a detail is forgotten, which will only make the process more painful.

So what to do in the meantime? Well you have two options. First of all you could test Thunderbird 8 Prerelease with Lightning 1.0b8pre. This may be a different Thunderbird version, but the Lightning code is the same between those versions.

Then we have the first set of test builds for Thunderbird 7 beta and Lightning 1.0b7. These builds might have their quirks since not all parts of release automation went well. Please stay tuned, I’ll be posting an update when its advisable to move from testing with Thunderbird 8 to Thunderbird 7.

Conclusion

We need you now more than ever to make sure Lightning 1.0 is a success. This version will likely get more PR than the previous versions so it would be a pity if it weren’t in good shape or needs to be skipped for an urgent fix. I’m counting on you!

Uncategorized — Comments Off on Hello world!
09
Sep 11

Hello world!

Welcome to Blog.mozilla.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Project Updates — 52 comments
09
Aug 11

Lightning 1.0b5 released

As you’ve likely already noted, Lightning 1.0b5 was released on July 29th. It fixes some urgent issues that showed up during the 1.0b4 release, so everyone is strongly advised to update! Here’s a list of the most important changes:

  • Remote calendar with webcal:// location not working
  • Thunderbird Does Not Process Meeting Invites from Outlook, Google Calendar
  • Startup crash [@ cal::UTC()]
  • wcap not working since TB5 and Lightning 1.0b4rc2
  • Snoozing/Dismissing one event on alarm popup closes entire window
  • Event invitation not sent out when Outlook compatiblity is checked

If you are experiencing issues (Lightning not installing or the calendar not working at all), I’d suggest uninstalling Lightning and then doing a fresh install. Your calendar data will be kept intact, as it is contained in your profile.

We have now switched the nightly builds from comm-miramar to comm-aurora, I will post more information on this switch soon.

Project Updates — 36 comments
27
Jul 11

Having trouble with 1.0b4? Try 1.0b5rc3!

Unfortunately, some major errors slipped through in 1.0b4. You might have noticed the alarm window disappearing and a lot of misplaced beeps from the alarm system. You might have also noticed, that some of your calendars are no longer working (specifically, webcal:// calendars).

To fix these issues we are releasing 1.0b5 in the next 1-2 days, which contains 10 bugfixes.

As another highlight, 1.0b5 will now be compatible with both Thunderbird 5 and Thunderbird 6 to ensure you can continue using Lightning without extra hassle. If you are using Thunderbird 6.0b1 it would be great if you could give these test builds a spin.

Update: Another issue slipped in, I’ve modified the packages to fix it. If you have already downloaded, please try the following links!

You can get the builds here. If you get a 404, its likely they have not been propagated to all mirrors yet, check back in a few hours.

If you are using the Provider for Google Calendar, I have marked the current version compatible with Thunderbird 6. You can get it as usual from addons.mozilla.org

Thank you for your support!

Lightning — 23 comments
02
Jul 11

Lightning 1.0b4 has been released

I would like to announce the release of Lightning 1.0b4, which is now available via addons.mozilla.org.

Since our last release, we have fixed 140 bugs. Notable improvements for this release are:

  • Accept/Decline Events and Tasks directly via context menu
  • Improves CalDAV’s webdav-sync robustness and scalability
  • Event creation is now possible via click and drag in the time scale, even with a full schedule
  • Reminder window is now sorted ascending, the most important alarms are at the top
  • When moving events in the day and week view, you can now use shift to move by single minutes instead of 15 minute intervals.
  • Some representation problems have been fixed
  • Some problems with events and calendar have been fixed
  • New design, especially for Vista/Win7 with Aero support

Lightning 1.0 beta 4 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 37 different languages including English. Please read the release notes for Lightning 1.0 beta 4 before downloading.

As the release has been out since Tuesday, we have noticed that there is an issue with alarms and are working hard to fix this behavior. A new release will be ready in the next few weeks.

Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. You are an essential part of our success, so keep up the good work!

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