Archive for the 'iceape' Category

Here are the few noteworthy news about Mozilla packages in Debian:

• Iceape 2.7 made its way to unstable. This is a huge jump from the previously available 2.0.14, and finally happened because Iceape was finally the top item on my TODO list.
• Iceape 2.7 is also available for Squeeze users, on the Debian Mozilla team APT archive.
• Localization is now part of Iceweasel uploads, which means that upgrades won't break localization anymore. It also means the Debian Mozilla team APT archive now also ships Iceweasel locales.

Since I am expected to spend more than half my packaging time updating the debian/copyright file, I am hereby orphaning nspr, nss, iceape and xulrunner. I am also stopping work on webkit and iceweasel, but they don't end up in the orphan state since they are comaintained.

Good luck to my fellow developpers. (And sorry, sincerely)

Update: As I do realize writing while being pissed doesn't help making the motives right, and apparently, some people have seen this as an extortion, let me make things clearer:

I was starting to work on xulrunner 1.9.1 when the discussion about the copyright files came up. It will require a significant amount of time, and while Noah Slater's opinion alone wouldn't really have carried me that far, despite me saying so because I got pissed by his words, 2 messages from Jörg Jaspert (the only ones he posted so far in the thread, by the way) did make it clear that my work on xulrunner 1.9.1 was going to be a waste of time, which I already lack to properly handle the bugs in my maintained packages, let alone keeping the copyright file up-to-date.

As I am obviously unable to handle the amount of work required to maintain big packages, as drawing new blood in the mozilla team has always failed so far, I just prefer to stop than to over-overflow. Call it extortion to get people in the mozilla team if you want, I'm fine with the notion.

I've been thinking to stop working on big packages for nearly a year already, but never mentionned it but to a few people in a few occasions. I couldn't resolve myself to do it, though I did reduce the amount of time I spend on these packages (I was overflown, a year ago). I just found an excuse to actually do it.

I must say I feel awkward now, and I still don't know if I will be able to keep this resolution.

As for the new copyright file format, with full licensing information and copyright holders list, I *did* try, on a significantly smaller piece of software than the mozilla packages, namely on Webkit, which is not really small either but still 6 times less files than xulrunner. I must say I hate to have to list copyright holders and file names with a passion, and the amount of time it takes. It is the main reason why there wasn't more uploads of WebKit svn snapshots in the archive...

Last but not least, thanks for the nice comments.

Ars Technica has recently posted an article about the new Opera alpha release, with some Javascript benchmark results showing it is quite faster than version 9.23. It also goes to compare with Firefox and IE7, but omits some other not so unimportant browsers. I think the main reason is because they seem to have only tested Windows browsers. Sure, Safari has been released recently on Windows, but it is still quite marginal.

Anyways, I was wondering how all this was going under Linux, and also, how (good?) WebKit would perform compared to others.

So, I tried the same Javascript speed tests on various browsers under Linux on my laptop, which happens to be a Pentium M 1.5GHz.

And the winner is...

So, It seems the speed gain Opera got on Windows doesn't happen much on Linux.

An interesting result, is that Iceweasel, with a bunch of extensions installed, is slower than Epiphany, despite both using the same rendering engine and Javascript library. Running Iceweasel in safe mode makes it the same speed as Epiphany, though. So having extensions does not only clutter the UI, but actually has an impact on how fast the Javascript code in web pages is going to run.

And well, WebKit is the fastest for this testcase, though it stays behind Opera on some specific tests.

A week ago, I started the long overdue task of triaging bugs reported on iceape/mozilla. When I started, the count was 364, duplicated excluded.

I'm still not halfway through the bug list, but already the bug count is down to 263, as of today. That is about a hundred bugs closed or merged. I can't believe there were still bugs so old but yet not merged to even older occurrences of the same bugs.

Since it is easier to appreciate the effort with nice colors, I started graphing the bug counts for iceape.

Sune Vuorela started some similar things for kde a while ago, so, thinking this could be useful for a whole lot more people than KDE and Mozilla maintainers, I also started graphing the bug counts for all packages. There is not enough backlog to have more than the last week, though. I'm a bit concerned about the fact that the RRD updates take a lot of time and may induce some load on gluck... Please DSA hit me if you want it to be moved elsewhere.

Anyways, back to iceape bugs, the oldest bug I closed was #80787, which was actually fixed as soon as I first uploaded xulrunner a year ago. On the other hand, the oldest I didn't close is #78654. There are some other winners that I'm amazed they've not been treated upstream in the last 6 years.

Now, while I tried to correctly and conveniently tag these oldest bugs, I didn't take the required amount of time to track them in upstream bugzilla. So if you, dear reader, have a little bit of time, I would really appreciate if you could go through the list of bugs* that are tagged upstream, but not yet forwarded and either find them in upstream bugzilla, or file them if they don't exist there.

* strangely enough, the raw=yes argument to the BTS doesn't seem to work properly. You can get a raw list (with no ordering by status or severity) through the LDAP gateway with the following command line:

ldapsearch -p 10101 -h bts2ldap.debian.net -x -b dc=current,dc=bugs,dc=debian,dc=org '(&(debbugsSourcePackage=iceape) (debbugsTag=upstream) (!(debbugsState=forwarded)) (!(debbugsState=done)))'

Note the LDAP query is probably not optimal. You can add debbugsID at the end of the command line if you're only interested in the bug numbers.

Erich, the Gecko version number is pretty meaningless.

With mozilla releases, the date reflects when the build was done. Which means if you build Firefox 1.5 today, it will get a Gecko/20070410 string.

With Debian releases (except icedove), the date reflects the date for the client.mk in the source tarball, which is one of the last file upstream touches before a release. This helps having the same date for all 11 architectures (even after a binNMU) and is somehow more significant, but still not that much.

There are, at the moment, 3 main branches for Gecko-based code: MOZILLA_1_8_0_BRANCH, MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH and HEAD. The latter currently contains Gecko 1.9 alpha, Firefox 3.0 alpha, etc., and will eventually be branched to a MOZILLA_1_9_BRANCH or something similar when going in beta. The other branches are respectively for Gecko 1.8.0.x (Firefox 1.5.0.x, Thunderbird 1.5.0.x, Seamonkey 1.0.y, Xulrunner 1.8.0.x) and Gecko 1.8.1.x (Firefox 2.0.0.x, Thunderbird 2.0.0.x (not yet released), Xulrunner 1.8.1.x).

[ In Debian Etch, we have Iceweasel 2.0.0.3 (Gecko 1.8.1.3), Iceape 1.0.8 (originally Gecko 1.8.0.10 but patched at version 1.8.0.11), Icedove 1.5.0.10 (Gecko 1.8.0.10 ; changes from version 1.8.0.11 didn't make it, but they don't affect the mailer code), and Xulrunner 1.8.0.11 (Gecko 1.8.0.11). The latter is used by kazehakase, galeon and epiphany. ]

Whenever a new security release for Firefox 1.5.0.x and other products from the Gecko 1.8.0.x branch are done, the Gecko date obviously changes, and doesn't reflect the fact that it's an older Gecko than that of Firefox 2.0.0.x...

Now if you take a closer look to the user agent string, you'll see something that is actually more significant than the Gecko date, i.e. the Gecko revision, such as "rv:1.8.0.11" in "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; ja_JP; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070324"

Or, if you really want to, be careful that, if /usr/lib/iceape/chrome is a directory (and not a symbolic link), your working directory is /usr/lib/iceape/chrome, or you will end up with the content of your current directory in /usr/share/iceape/chrome, which may be a big issue if you run apt-get from /.

If /usr/lib/iceape/chrome is a symbolic link, no worry, just ignore this message.

Thank you for your attention, and very sorry :(

Update : That's in such cases that you'd like special crafted tools to rebuild packages without the need to rebuild the whole thing when it comes to just change maintainer scripts (pre/postinst, pre/postrm...). Fortunately, I have pbuilder configured with ccache, but that doesn't help the buildds with their build job.