Calendar Weblog

I am happy to report, that the 0.7 of Lightning and Sunbird has been completed and is now available via AMO and the Calendar Project website.

Just 1.5 weeks after our originally scheduled release date, Lightning 0.7 and Sunbird 0.7 bring us a huge step closer to our 1.0 release, which we hope to release in 2008.

Notable improvements of this release are:

• It is now much easier to switch between the mail and calendar parts of Thunderbird thanks to a user interface redesign
• A redesigned event/task dialog has been enabled to gather feedback from the community. It offers a much cleaner user interface and additional functionality including:
  • Events/Tasks can be created in different timezones
  • Attendees can be added from a local or corporate LDAP directory
  • Free-Busy information is available for users of the Sun Java Calendar Server
  • Integrated display of recurrence patterns, reminders and attendees
  • Custom recurrences and reminders
  • Clear separation between tasks and events
• The new event summary dialog lists all the details of tasks and events for calendar which are read-only
• The Today Pane gives a quick overview over your current tasks and upcoming events. The Today Pane can be enabled/disabled by a toolbar button
• Colliding events (events in the same time slot) are shrunk so that they fit into the display of a day. This no longer affects other events on the same day
• Localized releases of Lightning and Sunbird in Chinese (simplified), Georgian, Lithuanian, Portuguese (European), Spanish (Argentina) and Turkish
• A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website

Lightning 0.7 and Sunbird 0.7 are available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 27 different languages including English.

Please use the following links to download the release:

• Lightning 0.7 (fully localized for 27 languages)
• Sunbird 0.7 in English or other languages

Please read the release notes for Lightning 0.7 and Sunbird 0.7 before downloading.

Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. We would not be able to do this without your assistance!

UPDATE: We have heard reports, that after upgrading Lightning to 0.7 all tasks and events are no longer displayed. To get your tasks and events back, switch to Calendar Mode using the toolbar button below the folder pane and ensure that all your calendars are marked as visible.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (48)

Very late during our test cycle we found one bug that is serious enough to warrant an RC3. It is bug 400407. Thanks to the help of Nick Thomas (cf) from Mozilla IT we have a patch ready, but are waiting on some of the comments to be addressed before checking it in.

We also said that if we spun an RC3 we would take bug 385155, since it is serious enough to need fixing in 0.7 and is a very low risk change. The patch for bug 385155 has already been checked in.

We should get the RC3 to you as soon as possible. Hopefully, it will be available Monday or Tuesday.

We're almost there!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 3:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

While reading LpSolit's article about the number of people fixing bugs on Bugzilla I thought that I should try to do the same for Calendar. Unfortunately this didn't really work as a lot of our fixed bugs were never assigned to the person who developed the fix and that completely screws our numbers.

So I thought of a second-best option: The overall number of bugs fixed per quarter for the last five years (click to enlarge):

What the numbers (and especially the moving average) clearly show is that we've been picking up some serious steam and are more active than ever.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

After reading the notice at the top of http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/all-older.html that as of today TB 1.5 will no longer be supported, I was thinking whether it would make sense to drop support for the TB 1.5 series after the 0.7 release.

I see the following reasons for this:

• As the TB 1.5 core code is pretty old, it hurts in a variety of places. See bug 330121, bug 351997, bug 389384 or bug 397920 for examples
• We have a very small team of core developers. And testing changes on TB 2, TB 1.5 and Sunbird puts a great burden on their shoulders. Dropping TB 1.5 from the requirements list would ease that burden
• Our testing community uses TB 2 almost exclusively, so TB 1.5 specific bugs are often found very late if ever
• Most Thunderbird users will probably already have made the switch to TB 2. So we wouldn't lose lots of users here

I would be interested in hearing your feedback on this.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (35)

The RC2 contains the following fixes that were added after the RC1:

• Bug 375390:
  New event boxes appear too large in month/multiweek view
• Bug 397642:
  stale agenda update
• Bug 398046:
  Add Turkish as an officially supported language
• Bug 398278:
  Superfluous freebusy debug messages in javascript console
• Bug 398303:
  Attendee preview is broken in new event summary dialog
• Bug 399433:
  Automatic scrolling feature doesn't work when searching for the next free meeting slot
• Bug 399616:
  Event on daylight saving time start or end day shows incorrect hour in day and week view
• Bug 399780:
  Automatic reminders for tasks not taken into account if no day has been selected

Here's where to get your hands on the RC:

• Lightning 0.7 RC2 (Scroll down to the pre-release section)
• Sunbird 0.7 RC2 in English (Scroll down to the pre-release section)
• Sunbird 0.7 RC2 in all other languages (Scroll down to the pre-release section)

After finishing RC2 we're holding a community test day tomorrow (Thursday, October 18th). We need you to tell us, if Lightning and Sunbird are ready for release, or if our developers have to fix some so far unknown bugs. So, join us in #calendar-qa on Thursday. All the information on the test day is in our Test Day Wiki Page.

Thanks to everyone who has helped with this release. And, an even bigger thank you to everyone who has waited for us to release it. Thanks!

Happy 0.7!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

We already found three show-stopper bugs, and that's why we had to reschedule the test day from Tuesday to Thursday. The new build is being crafted, and will be ready for us on Thursday. There are three things that must be tested:

• We must spot-check each locale to verify that they display properly (you can do this even if you can't read that language).
• We must make certain the bugs we found (399433, 399616, and 399780) were fixed properly. Note that these were all found by people just like you: you can make a difference!
• We must make certain no new bugs were introduced when those were fixed

We hope to see you on Thursday the 18th in #calendar and #calendar-qa. Come join the excitement and be a part of the 0.7 release.

See you Thursday!

Posted by Clint Talbert at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

One thing Simon forgot to mention is that we will be code-freezing for 0.7 RC2 this Friday at 23:59:59 UTC. So if you are the owner of any of the following localization bugs, please get them fixed, or let us know if there is something blocking you.

• Basque: Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399291)
• Macedonian: Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399290)
• Turkish: Missing default preferences (Bug 398046)

Please help us out on Tuesday, October 16, for smoke testing of the final 0.7 release. You can find us in #calendar and #calendar-qa on IRC. Thanks!

Posted by Clint Talbert at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In our weekly open developer confcall, that happens on every Wednesday we had a visitor today: David Ascher, the new CEO of MailCo or whatever it will be named.

We talked about a lot of things with David:

• Lightning/Sunbird release strategy
• Major obstacles to extension developers in Thunderbird and how those can be overcome
• David asked for suggestions for people who he might hire to work on Thunderbird
• Things that MailCo can do to support major extensions like Lightning (e.g. build support)
• The future of Thunderbird (e.g. Thunderbird 3 plans)
• and some minor stuff

We won't disclose all details of the discussion (like the future of Thunderbird discussion), because David will speak about that once he has sketched out a roadmap. But we're now more positive about Thunderbird's future and Lightning's role in it, than we were a few days ago, when we heard that David Bienvenu and Scott MacGregor are leaving the Mozilla Corporation.

More info will be posted later on this blog as Clint has taken some pretty detailed meeting notes, that he will post here in a short while. Let's end this post with saying that David is really a great guy to talk to and we were very happy to discuss our views with him. Thanks David!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I want to give you a short update on the state of localization for the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 0.7 release. The RC1 was released last week on October 4th. Since we haven't noticed any additional serious issues, a RC2 will come within the next few days.

While most localizations look fine from a quick glance, some still have minor issues, which need to be resolved within the next 2-3 days. The affected localizations are:

• Basque (eu): Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399290)
• Hungarian (hu): Missing default preferences (Bug 399241)
• Macedonian (mk): Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399291)
• Punjabi (pa-IN): 50% of user interface strings are displayed in English (Bug 398067)
• Turkish (tr): Missing default preferences (Bug 398046)

As we have seen no reaction from the Mongolian (mn) localizer, there will be no localized Mongolian builds for 0.7.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or post a comment here in the blog.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

• Bug 375390:
  New event boxes appear too large in month/multiweek view
• Bug 397642:
  stale agenda update
• Bug 398278:
  Superfluous freebusy debug messages in javascript console
• Bug 398303:
  Attendee preview is broken in new event summary dialog

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Since iCalendar (RFC 2445) is now in its final draft, we also tested some of the differences in the latest version of the specification with our software, to ensure we interpret it properly. Not surprisingly, we had a few issues here with specialized iTIP responses that no longer need to have either a DTSTART or DTEND property. There is also bug 393414, but that had been reported some time ago. Happily, Lightning and Sunbird supported most of these new features, but it demonstrated to me a huge hole in our testing -- more on that in a moment.

At the actual roundtable part of the conference, we discussed VALARMs (among other things). RFC 2445 doesn't give a clear picture of how these should be handled, so we (us and several other members) are drafting an extension to the specification which will give some guidance on how VALARM objects should be used.

There are lots of questions that need to be addressed:

• How do you annotate a snoozed alarm? What happens if you move the snoozed alarm? Is it remind me in 5 mintues, or remind me 5 minutes before the event?
• How do you handle alarms on shared calendars? On remote calendars?
• How to determine when an alarm was acknowledged? There was some agreement that we should standardize our X-MOZ-LASTACK property to carry this information.

More than anything, this conference demonstrated to me our dire lack of test automation. This is incredibly important as many changes are now occurring to the iTIP RFC (RFC 2446) which is going to be a crucial feature in 0.8.

Unfortunately, all the calendar team members are doing everything they can to continue making forward progress. We really need help in order to do any kind of meaningful automation. So, we have decided to host an Automated Test Summit some time after we ship 0.7.

In keeping with calendar tradition, we intend to make this event open and accessible to everyone. We (and hopefully many of you) will teach people the basic skills they need to write simple, Javascript-based automated tests.

In order to get this Summit off the ground, we desperately need you. I mean we need everyone. We need people who don't know Javascript. They will be our first editors. We need people who know how to teach and present. They will find the perfect style of online presentation for this. We need javascript programmers. They will craft the details of the training materials. We need writers. They will make those materials easy to follow and entertaining. If you've ever wanted to get involved and didn't know how, here is your opportunity.

We started the Calendar-QA team with a "Testcase Writing Day" that many said was doomed to fail. It didn't fail. It succeeded because so many of you made it happen. Once again, we have the opportunity to do what no one has done before. We can hold an online Automated Test Summit and set another standard of excellence for this project by breaking new ground in the online world.

Are you with us? If you want to get involved, ping either mschroeder or me (ctalbert) on IRC (#calendar, #calendar-qa), leave a comment on this blog, send me an email. Let us know. We'll post more details here as our plans take shape.

And...Don't forget about the 0.7 Release Candidate Test Day on Tuesday, October 9!!!!

Posted by Clint Talbert at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I come with good news, the first 0.7 release candidate (RC1) is ready! We have the Sunbird RC's for all our supported locales (26 including English) as well as the Lightning RC's for all our supported locales AND a Lightning Universal Mac build.

Here's where to get your hands on the RC:

• Lightning 0.7 RC1 (Scroll down to the pre-release section)
• Sunbird 0.7 RC1 in English (Scroll down to the pre-release section)
• Sunbird 0.7 RC1 in all other languages (Scroll down to the pre-release section)

After finishing RC1 we're holding a community test day next Tuesday, October 9th. We need you to tell us, if Lightning and Sunbird are ready for release, or if our developers have to fix some so far unknown bugs. Still a long list of bugs fixed since the release of 0.5 waits to be verified fixed, and the localized versions of Lightning and Sunbird need to be checked for completeness and correctness. So, join us in #calendar-qa on Tuesday. All the information on the test day is in our Test Day Wiki Page.

Thanks to everyone who has helped with this release. And, an even bigger thank you to everyone who has waited for us to release it. Thanks!

Happy 0.7!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)