Calendar Weblog

Now that Lightning 1.0 has been released, we can move forward and adapt to the rapid release schedule that Thunderbird and Firefox are using. In terms of development we will do this gradually but for localization we will do so right away. From now on, if you are already used to the Firefox/Thunderbird localizations you can think the same for Calendar.

Here is an overview of where to get the sources and see the translation progress

Specifically for Lightning 1.1, we have managed to open a milestone for Lightning 1.1. I'd like to encourage you to sign off on this milestone until December 5th so we can be ready in time for the release on December 20th.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Hi everyone,

it's really hard for me, but I've decided to resign from my different roles in The Calendar Project (mainly as webmaster and l10n contact) as of today (Monday).

Within the last six months it has become clear to me, that I'm not able to do the job adequately anymore, as my time has been more and more occupied with matters related to my private life and my day job. Therefore I've not been able to dedicate as much volunteer
time to this role as I would have liked or hoped.

I don't want to fill a role any longer, where I'm not satisfied with my performance and where a motivated person with more time on his/her hands could really make the difference, that I can't make anymore.

I'm currently working with Philipp, our lead developer, on a transition plan. Once a new person takes over, I'll make sure to be available and help him/her with ramping up in the new role. If anybody is interested in picking up some or all of this work, we (meaning Philipp or me) would love to talk to you.

I've written up a list of things, that I've performed regularly in this role to give people an impression of what's involved. The list is available here.

In my eyes, the Calendar Project is a project, where one person can really make a difference, unlike in large projects as Firefox, where the impact of one person is often just a drop in the sea. So please get in touch!

It's been a real pleasure working with all of you

PS: I will also resign from my role as Thunderbird l10n contact. Please see this blog post for more information.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 5:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

As announced nine days ago, the sign-off deadline for Lightning 1.0 beta2, the Lightning release that will accompany Thunderbird 3.1 is on May 24th at 23:59 pacific time.

Right now the picture looks like this:

• 22 locales have already signed-off
• 7 locales are green on the dashboard but have not yet signed off for their locale
• 1 locale is orange on the dashboard indicating that some obsolete strings still need to be removed or commented out
• Of the remaining 14 locales, many have only a limited amount of missing strings to catch-up. So it would be great if those locales could still join us

I will contact every locale that has not yet signed off their locale individually as well, so that everyone is aware of the current status.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As announced by Philipp two days ago the strings for the next Lightning release (1.0 beta2) have been frozen and you can now start to sign-in for this release.

We will be accepting sign-in requests until May 24 @ 23:59 pacific day time, so you have a little less than two weeks time to get your locale in shape.

Lightning 1.0 beta2 localizations will be taken from the l10n-1.9.2 repositories, so please work from there.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the mozilla l10n newsgroup or send me an e-mail.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 7:45 AM | Permalink

The Calendar Project is proud to report, that (finally) the 1.0 beta1 release of Lightning has been completed and is now available via AMO.

Nearly 16 months after the 0.9, this release is more than overdue and we're more than happy to get the nearly 500 bugfixes and improvements into the hands of our users. Notable improvements of this release are:

• Seamless integration into the new Thunderbird 3.0 user interface
• The different modes (calendar view, task view) are now displayed in tabs
• Lightning now supports SeaMonkey 2.0 as a host application
• You can now define multiple alarms for a single event
• CalDAV support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers have been improved
• The application stability, performance and memory consumption have been improved
• Estonian, Frisian, Galician, Hebrew, Indonesian, Punjabi, Sinhala, Tamil, Turkish and Vietnamese were added as new languages. Unfortunately no builds in Traditional Chinese, Slovenian, Swedish or Ukrainian are available for 1.0 beta1

Lightning 1.0 beta1 is available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 37 different languages including English. Please read the release notes for Lightning 1.0 beta1 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!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

Finally another status update. We're down to zero (0) blockers for our upcoming beta release. It's taken us some time to prepare all the necessary release bits for various reasons:

• We've decided to pull bug 529326 into this release, because we hope that it will significantly improve the performance for all our users, that use the local (storage) calendar. That bug was fixed today.
• We've started our outreach into the localizer community to get everyone onboard
• Our lead developer Philipp basically has to learn all the stuff that's needed for a release from the release engineering side on-the-fly. In the past we always had a dedicated release engineer who did this for us.

So please be patient and bear with us. The release is coming :-)

Since the last status update seven weeks ago, a number of bugs were fixed. Here's the list of the 35 bugs that were fixed since the last status update:

• Bug 298097: Rename calIRecurrenceRule endDate to untilDate
• Bug 350845: Implement relevant parameter methods (enumerate, exists, set)
• Bug 367359: Attendees Dialog: Zoom buttons don't work
• Bug 392194: Incorrect time and shadow is shown when draging an event in week/day view
• Bug 392734: Event dialog: start/end time get lost if 'all day event' is ticked/de-ticked once
• Bug 411540: No dialog asking to save event if mouse is used to quit Calendar
• Bug 413799: Thailand Holidays 2009-2011
• Bug 413847: Timezone preference changes require restart to take effect
• Bug 466938: Strange dump statements
• Bug 468846: Recurring all day event -> duplicate event created after editing a single all day event
• Bug 470430: Upgrade 0.3.1 to 0.9/1.0pre fails
• Bug 484089: Google Calendar fails in Shredder 3.0b3pre if a master password is set
• Bug 493304: Scrolling more than necessary to bottom needs hidden upscroll until pane scrolls again
• Bug 494140: Multiple reminders,relations,attachments created by modifying repeating event
• Bug 504029: installer has to consider new mozjs.dll for mozilla-central
• Bug 512436: Unconditional removal of 'disabled' state
• Bug 517700: Lightning Categories Pref pane not showing any categories
• Bug 517757: Small calendar-statusbar.js cleanup
• Bug 517805: Move printDialog to calendar/base/content
• Bug 517979: Links for contributed Lightning 0.9 builds are broken
• Bug 518865: Calendar Properties item missing from the SeaMonkey Edit menu
• Bug 521815: Fix a few provider warnings
• Bug 522125: List all tabs dropdown is empty with Lightning installed
• Bug 523621: Update internal timezone database to version 2009p
• Bug 523943: Timezones Definitions needs SeaMonkey minimum correcting
• Bug 523987: Dismissing alarms doesn't work with Provider for Google Calendar
• Bug 526172: Rename communicator-overlay-preferences.xul
• Bug 526264: 'No timezones found' error during startup, calendars not visible
• Bug 527057: Port bug 519357 - Only load known binary components from app directory to comm-central
• Bug 527065: Create Lightning build servers for comm-central/mozilla-central repo
• Bug 528506: In SeaMonkey Account Central pane, the "create new calendar" icon is misaligned
• Bug 528540: Adjust version numbers to distinguish builds from comm-1.9.1/comm-central
• Bug 528788: Feed the crowds, fix Calendar breadcrumbs
• Bug 529326: Create indexes for the local calendar cache
• Bug 529945: Build problems on Linux and W32

As always, our thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that have made this possible.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 3:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

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.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 2:43 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)

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)

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (39)

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.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 5:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 5:27 AM | Permalink

• 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):
  • Thunderbird:Activity_Manager (emre started to work on that)
  • search results (tab, exptoolbar)
  • POP3 disk usage options
• 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

Posted by Simon Paquet at 6:06 AM | Permalink

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!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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:

• Lightning 0.9 RC2:
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • Mac OS X
  • Solaris (Intel)
  • Solaris (SPARC)
• Sunbird 0.9 RC2:
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • Mac OS X
  • Solaris (Intel)
  • Solaris (SPARC)

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

Posted by Simon Paquet at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)

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.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 2:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

So I'm back from the Mozilla summit and hope to get out of my jet lag within the next few days. It was really a great adventure with bears, a power outage and a rockslide which got me first floatplane flight ever.

While many people seem to believe that Microsoft is behind all of this, I believe that this was all carefully planned out by Dan Portillo and John Lilly of MoCo :) My hat goes off to dan, who did a perfect job of organizing this whole event for over 400 people.

The summit was great in every aspect. I met lots of people, who I had only known online for years like Gary from the Rumbling Edge, Robert Kaiser (KaiRo) of SeaMonkey fame, Wayne Mery (Thunderbird QA), Axel Hecht (Pike), Mitchell Baker, the hopefully soon to be appointed MoFo Executive Director Mark Surman and many more who I can't possibly all name, because then this post would get a few pages longer.

The sessions were great (I went to most of the Calendar/Thunderbird related ones) and I even got to hold one session myself, where I could introduce myself to a lot of localizers in my new role as Thunderbird localization coordinator.

Besides the sessions, I also got the chance to talk with some people more in depth about some issues, most notably with Mitchell Baker, David Boswell and Mark Surman about sorting out the issues of getting the Calendar Project into the Mozilla Foundation directed giving program, the Mozilla Foundation vision and more ways of cooperating with the Mozilla Foundation and leveraging its assets to move the Calendar Project forward. We also did some product planning regarding the necessary steps for enabling Lightning in Thunderbird.

There's much more, that I could talk about, but I will just close this post by saying that this was a really great event, that many people will likely be talking about for years to come. Thanks Mozilla for organizing this!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday we had a pretty interesting developer conference call, which was basically about the issue that only a very small team is currently developing on Lightning and Sunbird (basically just three people), that it is hard to reach community expectations with regards to bugfixes and feature work with so small a team and what would be necessary to attract more outside developers.

From my point of view one of our shortcomings in the past has been on the communication front. With that I don't mean the communication between different people on certain bug characteristics or code issues (that works great), but the communication between the calendar project and our community.

Currently our channels of communication are:

• This blog, which just gets a post every one to two weeks with a bug fix status update
• our developer and support newsgroups (mozilla.dev.apps.calendar and mozilla.support.calendar), which are not exactly buzzing with activity
• IRC, which not many people are watching

The result - at least as far as I see it - is that

• the core people from the project come across as a closed circle to which it is hard to get in to (the opposite is true)
• what's going on in the project is not exactly transparent. Instead I would call it opaque.

So what can we do to improve our situation, to make the project more transparent, to raise the interest in the project and by that to gain more outside contributors? A few things come to my mind:

• We need to talk more about what we are doing. Therefore every core contributor will try to commit himself to at least blog about various stuff at least once a week from now. These posts will probably range from developer-oriented topics (interesting or disgusting pieces of code, recent bugfixes, UI considerations, QA problems/successes/challenges) and project-related topics (PR issues, community relations, ...) to basically anything that the people find worthwhile to blog about.
  In my opinion a great example to follow here is the Firefox community. Where nearly everybody involved in the project (developers, build engineers, QA staff, PR and marketing people, management) tries to blog regularly about various Firefox stuff or other stuff that interests them. The outside image that this creates is the image of a beehive, where everybody is doing lots of stuff to improve Firefox and in my opinion stuff like this also attracts outside people, because everybody would like to contribute to a project that is alive and well instead of a project that is stalling or dead.
• We need to raise the awareness of the project in the outside world. I'll try to contact a few people to get some press contacts, in the hope to do some interviews with some people interested in open source. We hope that this will raise the awareness of Lightning and Sunbird and bring in outside contributors.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 3:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

I want to make those of you, who are actively translating the calendar products (Lightning and Sunbird) aware, that our string freeze for our next release 0.9 is approaching. According to our release schedule we are aiming for a string freeze on July 14 2008, which is two and a half
weeks away from now.

After the string freeze we are currently planning for two additional weeks before we try to release our first release candidate on July 28. We would really appreciate it if you could have your locales already in shape for the first RC as this will broaden both the localization and application testing base.

That gives you about a month to get your localizations in shape if you start now or two weeks, if you decide to wait for the string freeze. From my point of view, it certainly makes sense to start working now, at least in a few areas. If you take a look at all the string changes since our 0.8 release and now, you'll notice that we've done a lot of cleanup work by removing unused and obsolete entities. This is definitely something that you can start working on now, while doing the remaining update work after the string freeze.

The 0.9 release will again come from the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH, but since we're keeping both the 1.8 branch and the cvs trunk in total sync, it makes sense for you to commit your changes to both at the same time.

I'll post some status updates in the coming weeks. If any of you will not be able to keep his locale updated for the 0.9 release, please let me know beforehand. As of now we are planning with all localizations that were included in the 0.8 release as well as with the new locales added since then (Norwegian (Nynorsk), Romanian and Traditional Chinese).

Please let me know if any of you wants to join us for 0.9.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them in the corresponding discussion thread on the newsgroup mozilla.dev.l10n.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 6:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Calendar team will freeze all Calendar-related strings tomorrow night (2008-01-21) at 20:00 PST (2008-01-22 05:00 CET).

Localizers are encouraged to start working on their translation of the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 0.8 release after the string freeze is in effect. Localizers should try to finish a first draft of their translation by February 7th, 2008 (you can still check in corrections afterwards).

We are currently planning to release our first release candidate of Lightning and Sunbird one day after this date (2008-02-08) and it would be good if localized builds of all languages would be available by then, to enable the different l10n communities to test the localization quality.

Please direct all questions to the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup, which you can also follow via Google Groups.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just a short info, that the Calendar developers have decided to move the string freeze for the upcoming 0.8 release (currently scheduled for February 2008) one week forward.

The string freeze will now be in effect on January 14th, 2008.

We made this decision, because we need some additional time to finish some of our UI work, because pretty much everyone from the developers is away over the christmas holidays.

If you have any questions, please post them to the mozilla localizer newsgroup.

I wish everyone of our localizers a merry christmas and a happy new year. Thank you for your continuing support!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 3:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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 Calendar QA Team at 4:31 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)

I want to inform you that the release branch has been created, from which Lightning and Sunbird 0.7 will be released. The name of this branch is SUNBIRD_0_7_BRANCH.

Please note that code checkins on this branch are restricted. You will need the approval from our lead developer, Daniel Boelzle, before you commit changes to that branch. Localizers do not need approval for checkins on this branch.

Developers and localizers should however make sure, that all changes are committed to the trunk, the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH and the SUNBIRD_0_7_BRANCH in parallel. This is to avoid inconsistencies as we do parallel development on the trunk and the branches.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Thanks for bearing with us as we missed the initially proposed release date for our first release candidate (RC1), which was originally scheduled to be mid-september. This will hopefully be the last status update before the RC1.

The current plan (as of yesterday evening) is to create a release branch today, create the RC1 release builds, do a short smoketest and release those builds as the official 0.7 RC1 within this week.

As you can see from the list below, we have taken some fixes pretty late in the game to give you a better and more stable user experience once 0.7 is released. Our localizers have also been pretty busy and we are proud to report that we'll have 24 non-English languages for the RC1 (3 more than for 0.5) and hopefully 1 or 2 more (Argentinian Spanish and Mongolian) for the final release.

Here's the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

• Bug 356056:
  Snooze dialog needs to be more flexible
• Bug 359443:
  Deleting item from Agenda deletes an email instead
• Bug 370148:
  API enhancement: Providing free-busy information
• Bug 379894:
  'Show completed tasks' checkbox has no effect on CalDav calendar
• Bug 386480:
  View mode is not remembered after Thunderbird restart
• Bug 388414:
  [Today Pane] Implement 'MiniDay' Pane
• Bug 390147:
  Export calendar is not wired up correctly
• Bug 390842:
  Error: redeclaration of var Cc in console, kills Lightning
• Bug 393388:
  Go back to calendar view via mode toolbar -> 'Day starts at' is not recognized, view start at 0:00
• Bug 395781:
  Event Dialog: Hyperlinks don't provide visual feedback (focus rectangle) if selected with tab key
• Bug 395883:
  Readonly dialog says 'Repeat: Occurs ???' for yearly and monthly recurring items
• Bug 396223:
  Only set calendar preferences if they have changed
• Bug 396297:
  Event/Task description is not saved when exiting by closing the new edit window
• Bug 396667:
  Task dialog: clicking the timezone link doesn't bring up the timezone picker
• Bug 396865:
  workaround alarm without DUE
• Bug 396873:
  Event dialog is messed up if being subscribed to old Sunbird calendar
• Bug 396877:
  Agenda update fails after deleting a task from tasklist
• Bug 396888:
  Event dialog: Timezone links are not displayed correctly for all-day events
• Bug 396931:
  Toolbar buttons for switching calendar views shift when depressed
• Bug 396949:
  Strict warnings in agenda-tree.js, messenger-overlay-sidebar, messenger-overly-toolbar
• Bug 397029:
  Add msimg32 to Makefile.in
• Bug 397255:
  Various windows: Labels are not properly associated with the controls they're labelling
• Bug 397359:
  Today pane may be raised in calendar mode
• Bug 397542:
  Enable es-AR (Espanol Argentina) localization

Thanks again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Another status update as we're coming ever closer to the first release candidate (RC1) of the upcoming 0.7 release. The most notable fix is probably the fix to bug 393387 which will hopefully take care of all the disappearing events issues, that some users have experienced in the 0.5 release.

The RC1 will also be the first chance for localizers to get their hands on a fully localized build of Lightning, so that the localization quality can be estimated (and maybe improved) for the final 0.7 release. To achieve this we have worked hard behind the scenes with many localizers and as of today 20 localizations other than English are ready for the RC1 (Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, Basque, French, Gaelic, Georgian, Italian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Europe), Russian, Slovak, Swedish and (for the first time) Chinese).

Were still missing localized strings from the Hungarian, Mongolian, Portuguese (Brazil), Punjabi and Slovenian localizers, but hopefully we'll be able to get localized builds for these languages as well, so that all users of the 0.5 release can update to 0.7 once it comes out.

Here's the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

• Bug 351084:
  Can't set alarm for new task, existing or default alarm throws error (add-on patch)
• Bug 356569:
  wcap subscription auto registration by explicit pref only for now
• Bug 357079:
  Agenda tab doesn't update today's date after hibernating
• Bug 359443:
  Deleting item from Agenda deletes an email instead
• Bug 367159:
  [Mac] Date picker disappears after it is clicked on, before user selects a date, POOR MANs FIX
• Bug 377403:
  Event dialog: iTIP invitations not sent
• Bug 374235:
  Breakpad should replace Talkback in future versions of Sunbird
• Bug 386479:
  Switch to Calendar mode don't work properly using buttons, Calendar menu or keyboard shortcut
• Bug 386636:
  mail-mode should be visible after clicking the tray-icon of an incoming mail (addon-patch)
• Bug 388418:
  Can't create 'Last day of the month' recurrence rule
• Bug 388985:
  Calendar color not applied in views: events are translucent
• Bug 393366:
  Calendar List check boxes are not XP/Vista platform conform
• Bug 393387:
  week view is blank
• Bug 393412:
  calPeriod code improvements
• Bug 394149:
  Event dialog: Status field (tentative, confirmed, canceled) is missing
• Bug 395288:
  Event dialog: Wrong reminder entry shown for odd durations
• Bug 395658:
  Colliding event boxes in rotated view
• Bug 395777:
  changing default for non-owned calendar to readOnly
• Bug 396093:
  Menu View -> Task List is broken, Task List is always visible
• Bug 396206:
  Make it easier to overlay the calendar properties dialog
• Bug 396269:
  Add zh-CN (Simplified Chinese) to shipped-locales
• Bug 396277:
  fixing view update after timezone, tasks in view change
• Bug 396580:
  Fix guessSystemTimezone if no TZNAME is set

Thanks again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

At long last, the 0.5 RC's are ready! We have the Sunbird RC's for all our supported locales as well as the Lightning RC's for all our supported locales AND a Lightning Universal Mac build.

We are truly happy to have this finally done. But, now is where we need your help. We've been in total lockdown for some time on this release, so we think the actual code bits are OK. But, this is the first time that the localizers (and anyone) has seen the localized Lightning builds.

We need your help to verify the localizations

We are holding a Localization test day on Friday, June 1 from 1200 UTC to 0100 UTC. Please drop into the #calendar-qa channel to help us test the localized builds and ensure that we can quickly ship the 0.5 that we have all been waiting for.

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

• Lightning 0.5 RC 1
• Sunbird 0.5 RC 1

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 0.5!

Posted by Calendar QA Team at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Posted by Simon Paquet at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

• Catalan (ca)
• Czech (cs)
• German (de)
• Danish (da)
• Spanish-Europe (es-ES)
• Basque (eu)
• French (fr)
• Hungarian(hu)
• Irish (ga-IE)
• Italian (it)
• Mongolian (mn)
• Dutch (nl)
• Polish (pl)
• Russian (ru)
• Slovenian (sl)
• Slovakian (sk)

Posted by Simon Paquet at 2:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

• Bug 278236: don't use time_t, to prevent crashes for dates before 1970 or after 2038
• Bug 315672: Manually unfold lines so as to not split UTF-8 character
• Bug 321384: New views need to support multiple selection
• Bug 322827: store names of x- properties, and use that name when serializing
• Bug 327912: Cleans up Sunbird File and Edit menus
• Bug 328576: Fixes recurring events when using CaDAV
• Bug 330178: Adds edit and delete to calendar tab context menu
• Bug 334468: Adds date and imip-bar to meeting requests
• Bug 335462: Queues up authentication requests to prevent multiple auth prompts
• Bug 335463: Shows tasks which have a entryDate earlier than the first date in the view
• Bug 337712: Uses X-MOZ-LOCATION-PATH to construct the uri for deleting if available
• Bug 340195: Land string for Print Calendar before string freeze
• Bug 343049: Add an iMIP bar for adding IMIP items into the calendar
• Bug 344535: Adds nsIFilePicker filter to fix Linux crash
• Bug 345310: Adds 'Repeat every n [weeks|months]'
• Bug 348028: Change strings on new calendar wizard
• Bug 348245: Fixes regression where datepicker no longer works after using date/year dropdown
• Bug 348254: Fixes duplicate xul element ids and changes captions to labels for some prefs
• Bug 348798: Removes braces in uuids
• Bug 349354: Editing recurring event resets any this-recurrence-only changes
• Bug 349788: Adds convertDate to ensure dates passed to cpp are proper datetime objects and fixes missing recurring events for UTC+ timezones
• Bug 350055: Update Win32 package list to include urlformatter
• Bug 350287: create a webcal protocol handler
• Bug 350375: Fixes invalid behaviour when editing a todo with an alarm
• Bug 350965: iTIP information must be cached in an XPCOM object
• Bug 351168: Add WCAP builds
• Bug 351199: Stubs out missing methods to reduce useless exceptions in CalDAV provider
• Bug 351380: Disable natural language parsing in lightning datepicker
• Bug 351452: Fixes cut off custom alarm fields
• Bug 351460: Removes print command disabling when a task has focus
• Bug 351528: Tasks with an entryDate but no dueDate no longer cause errors
• Bug 351558: Add ga-IE to all locales
• Bug 351566: Update lightning's install.rdf for 0.3
• Bug 351598: Fixes task SQL query
• Bug 351737: Converts rule.endDate to UTC so the later getInTimezone works properly
• Bug 351781: Adds missing file from bug 350965's checkin to packages-static
• Bug 351815: Fix printing bustage from last night's selection landing
• Bug 351866: Fixes inability to print December month grid
• Bug 351868: Fixes changing start-end time with drag n drop
• Bug 351902: tweak vertical size for day view to make short events better readable
• Bug 351990: Remove the talkback readme.txt
• Bug 352071: Iterates over selected items when modifying or deleting
• Bug 352188: Fixes deleting event using DEL key
• Bug 352538: Add mn and eu to all-locales
• Bug 352674: Adds .wav filter to alarm sound file picker
• Bug 352713: Fixes case on stringbundle substitution character
• Bug 352795: Fixes EXDATEs in Sunbird 0.2 ICS files when importing
• Bug 352842: second try at manually unfolding ics files. really use octet arrays now, to not decode from utf8 too early
• Bug 352858: Make imip-bar styling match junk/phishing/remote content notification bars
• Bug 352862: Changes dragging a recurring event child to only move that child
• Bug 352865: don't allow moving an item to a readonly calendar
• Bug 353044: remove dump in calMonthGridPrinter for perf win
• Bug 353051: Changes Dismiss All to loop in reverse so as to not miss any alarms
• Bug 353060: Time changes lost if editing immediately after creation
• Bug 353470: Gives and takes focus from todolist items in richlisttextbox so you don't unknowingly delete email when attempting to delete a todo
• Bug 353482: Adds Danish to all-locales
• Bug 353567: Forces default alarms on events to be negative
• Bug 353725: Fixes regression by moving UTC conversion inside the else block
• Bug 353797: Ensures endDate.isDate is false
• Bug 353857: Adds missing arg to recurrenceInfo.getOccurrences
• Bug 354073: Fix pre-1900 dates in the datepicker causing a crash on Windows
• Bug 354465: Fixes calls to nsIAuthPrompt2 so it shows the save password checkbox
• Bug 354633: Fixes item length computation when drag-n-dropping

Posted by Simon Paquet at 2:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

1. As of now, we have 9 translations available for Sunbird 0.3 alpha2. These can be found on the Sunbird website. If people from other countries want to make their Sunbird translation available, then please announce your finished localization in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup.
2. Yesterday we made a major breakthrough for Sunbird localizers. Matthew Willis (lilmatt) fixed Bug 267981 and Bug 281935 enabling localization through CVS and also building localized Sunbird builds directly from the Mozilla CVS repository.
   Because of this, all localizers should read the updated Calendar Localization page on the mozilla.org wiki and make themselves familiar with CVS (if you have not already done so). A lot of interesting material can be found on the homepage of the Mozilla Localization Project. If you have any questions please post them to the mozilla.dev.l10n or the mozilla.dev.apps.calendar newsgroup.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 6:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

• Bug 339670: Fix SQL query for non-recurrent events being incorrect when getItems was called for a range of time with different start and end offsets
• Bug 335594: Makes Sunbird's release notes url NOT hardcoded
• Bug 337848: Only use times for Today and Tomorrow in the agenda view
• Bug 339509: Day view doesn't always display the correct day
• Bug 339509: Wrong day selected in views if selected timezone does not match system timezone
• Bug 315960: Improve performance when switch day/week views
• Bug 335643: Make tasks in the multiweek and month views show up even if their start date is earlier than the start of the view

Posted by Simon Paquet at 5:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

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