Nightly Builds of Phoenix Based on Stable Series of Mozilla

aigner · Post by **aigner** » March 9th, 2003, 6:44 pm

Why isn't there a nightly build of Phoenix that is based on the stable series of Mozilla (i.e. in another week or so, 1.3). Are there such significant dependencies on developmental builds of Mozilla? Assuming so, when does Phoenix ever stabilize?

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » March 9th, 2003, 6:49 pm

Phoenix is in the early stages of development with many components undergoing rapid change. As the user interface is under heavy development it makes little sense for the renderer to be based on a stable branch.

Phoenix is built off of the top of the Mozilla trunk. Everything other than the UI is a dependency, so to speak.

Expect 1.0 to be 'stable'. Until then, sticking with the milestones ensures that you have a build which is suitable for daily use.

- Chris

ehume · Post by **ehume** » March 9th, 2003, 8:18 pm

I agree in principle. Yet there are less buggy builds than the milestone. Try 2003-02-21. You can also try 2003-03-04, but you will need an older profile. It chokes when you build a new profile. Other stable builds are 2003-01-29, 2002-12-28 and 2002-11-14.

nilson · Post by **nilson** » March 9th, 2003, 8:23 pm

March 4 build works for me with a new profile. (XP)

ehume · Post by **ehume** » March 9th, 2003, 9:09 pm

nilson wrote:March 4 build works for me with a new profile. (XP)

Lucky you. I'm running WinXP Pro SP1. Don't know why new profiles crash, but they do. Others have the same problem. I wonder what we're doing differently?

On a completely unrelated note, I have discovered that my HD is harboring 52 different Px Win32 builds, dating back to the 2002-10-23 0.3 milestone. Such an obsession! As Han Solo once remarked (in a different context, of course), "Sometimes I amaze even myself."

Chris Cook · Post by **Chris Cook** » March 9th, 2003, 9:12 pm

thumperward wrote:Phoenix is in the early stages of development with many components undergoing rapid change. As the user interface is under heavy development it makes little sense for the renderer to be based on a stable branch.

Phoenix is built off of the top of the Mozilla trunk. Everything other than the UI is a dependency, so to speak.

Expect 1.0 to be 'stable'. Until then, sticking with the milestones ensures that you have a build which is suitable for daily use.

- Chris

So with this logic, when the 0.9 milestone is reached Phoenix would no longer be based on the absolute latest branch but would be based on the most stable branch in order to prepare for the big 1.0?

It seems that in earlier days when Phoenix releases were more frequent, the milestones were often delayed slightly to aquire an important mozilla bugfix. Why would similar concern not be used for future milestones? It is difficult to evaluate what you have (as far as new features and bugs) without reaching a stable point with the application. I don't see the logic in constantly jumping to the next experimental mozilla branch so that you never have a stable build like mozilla does, although I admit that I don't understand the situation as the moz devs do.

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » March 9th, 2003, 9:52 pm

Phoenix isn't "jumping" from branch to branch. it's build on the trunk and always has been. Any waiting that has been done has still been riding CVS and waiting for the trunk to pick up a bugfix.

I would expect that SurfZilla 0.9 will coincide with a beta split, with SurfZilla picking up trunk fixes building to whatever Moz milestone is impending and leaving the alpha section of Moz to carry on ahead. But at that point I'd imagine our lil' browser to be a fully-fledged product of its own and to be developed in a slightly separate manner (like Camino) along with the other offshoots of Moz such as Thunderbird.

- Chris

IamBobaFett · Post by **IamBobaFett** » March 9th, 2003, 11:26 pm

ehume wrote:I agree in principle. Yet there are less buggy builds than the milestone. Try 2003-02-21. You can also try 2003-03-04, but you will need an older profile. It chokes when you build a new profile. Other stable builds are 2003-01-29, 2002-12-28 and 2002-11-14.

Worked fine here when I made a new profile for the 2003-03-04 build on my WIN98 machine.

galapogos · Post by **galapogos** » March 10th, 2003, 1:07 am

Well I'm using March 4th build on an old profile, but its still buggy. It has a few rendering bugs I think, that causes some images to be renderred incorrectly(wrong images at the wrong places, or links to html pages being rendered as some random image). It also seem to have a habit of crashing once in a while. Feb 21 build was much stabler I remember.

SwampFan · Post by **SwampFan** » March 10th, 2003, 7:42 am

I had originally installed 20030304 with an old profile, but had too many problems - I'm using Win98SE. I created a new profile, reinstalled the TBE extension and Qute theme, and reinstalled my plugins (Flash, Shockwave, WMP) and it now works great. No problems or crashes in the last 6 days.