Updating SeaMonkey Modern (Help Wanted)

[Philip Chee]

How are things progressing?

I am continuing working now after getting your advice.
Mozapps has been completed by 60% or more.
It is possible to open it to the public for the time being in least.

No problem. Let me know when you have something to show.

Phil

[Philip Chee]

Hi there,

I have filed a meta bug Bug 456757 - [Meta] Update the Modern theme for SeaMonkey 2.0 to better track progress.

Phil

[Philip Chee]

I have filed a meta bug Bug 456757 - [Meta] Update the Modern theme for SeaMonkey 2.0 to better track progress.

Since this is a meta/tracking bug, the actual work will be done in separate bugs which will be set to block the tracking bug. Each bug will focus on one module (or directory) in /mozapps/ e.g. extensions, handling, plugins, and so on.

So what goes on in each bug? Lets take an example of what I did some time back when I filed Bug 390270 (SuiteRunner extension dialogs come up transparent or invisible and unusable).

After opening the bug I attached a patch. A patch is basically a unified diff file made against the tip of the source code repository. At the time of the bug, mozilla was still using CVS so I used the cvs diff -u8 -p command. Currently mozilla (and SeaMonkey) has moved to using Mercurial as the source control system.

It is important to note that you can submit the most beautiful CSS ever but no Mozilla reviewer (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey) will accept it unless it is submitted in the form of a patch.

Well after submitting the patch the next step is to submit it for review. I look at SeaMonkey project areas to see who is a suitable reviewer for a theme related bug. Well no I didn't because I knew that Neil is the UI Tsar for SeaMonkey. But in general Neil would be the primary reviewer with stefanh concentrating on Mac OSX theme bugs. In addition if you want to work on a SeaMonkey bug you should also read SeaMonkey code reviews and flag rules. Thunderbird and Firefox will have their own review requirements of course.

As you can see Neil pointed out several problems with my initial patch so I revised it and resubmitted it for review. After several iterations, review and super-review was finally granted. Bug 413953 (Modern is missing global/richlistbox.css) is another example of how much review a bug goes through before getting approval.

Given this it makes sense to break up a large bug like updating Modern into much smaller pieces so that if one gets stuck the other pieces could still make progress and we could split them up between reviewers as well (theoretically, as we don't have enough reviewers).

Phil

[Philip Chee]

In case I've forgotten to mention it somewhere, since toolkit/mozapps is RTL aware, the CSS in Modern for /mozapps/ should be RTL aware as well - even though Modern in general isn't RTL aware.

Phil

[quattro]

Philip, just one suggestion. One of the most visually appealing, if not the best theme for Seamonkey was Pinball, developed by Johannes Schellen. The theme is already based on Modern theme.
http://mozilla-themes.schellen.net/
He still plans to maintain the theme for SM2 (and SM only), so you might contact him and maybe even include the theme in default install.

[Philip Chee]

Philip, just one suggestion. One of the most visually appealing, if not the best theme for Seamonkey was Pinball, developed by Johannes Schellen. The theme is already based on Modern theme.
http://mozilla-themes.schellen.net/
He still plans to maintain the theme for SM2 (and SM only), so you might contact him and maybe even include the theme in default install.

Our review requirements are ... very severe. That's why I suggested to Kuden that we land changes to mozapps bit by bit and getting each past the review process one at a time. The chances of adding a complete theme without any changes at all are essentially Nil, None, Nada, Zero.

Phil