SeaMonkey:First Release

The first release of our new project will be what a "Mozilla 1.8" was meant to be. As we will use a different but not-yet-decided version number, we call it "first release" in this document. Please refrain from calling it "1.8" in here but use that generic term. For pointers to further releases, use either "second release" or "a future release".

from n.p.m.seamonkey (written by bz):

> Without me knowing well what is involved in "pushing out a release"

At least:

1)  Tagging the trunk at some point when it's stable (coordinating this with
    other trunk Gecko/etc consumers, one hopes).
2)  Lots of organized and thorough testing of the branch you created.
3)  Filing bugs based on the results of that testing.
4)  Getting said bugs fixed on that branch.
5)  Writing release notes.
6)  Creating builds from the branch.
7)  Pushing those builds to the FTP server.
8)  Announcing the release.

Asa, please chime in if I missed something through ignorance?

I suspect step #2 is somewhat time-consuming, as are step #4 and step #5.

-Boris

Quoting Ben Goodger from IRC:

<ben_> so here's what you need to do to ship a release. 
       1. decide what you want out of it (a good start is to develop a product plan in 
          wiki.mozilla.org with checkmarked features/etc) 
       2. find engineers to do each of the items in the aforementioned list
       3. get those engineers to provide blurb+swag for each - this is a description of 
          the item + estimated time to completion or an ETA. 
       4. have them implement the features. 
       5. deal with bugs that arise, manage the
<ben_> 6. when your features are done, you can beta... when you get to a low level of 
       remaining bugs, you can kick off the final release process. 
<Callek> ben_ 5. Deal with bugs that arise, manage the  ...??? (cut off)
<ben_> the final release process involves things like documenting changes (release noets,
       product pages, etc). 
<ben_> er, "manage them using bugzilla flags, etc. prioritize them and have people 
       work on those."
<ben_> ... getting testing builds spun, having interested users test them and submit feedback, 
       driving the list to zero and handling new bugs as they come in.
<ben_> Asa probably has more info on the latter half of this process. 
<ben_> but what I would suggest starting with is saying, "what do we want from Seamonkey 1.8?" 
<ben_> and start listmaking in wiki.mozilla.org
<ben_> you need to identify the work involved in that task then
<ben_> break it down into pieces
<ben_> findpeople to help and get estimates.

MozillaReleaseChecklist

We'd really like to know what can be done by which people (perhaps some of those tasks can still be done or helped with by MoFo, but it seems we can't rely on that any more).

QA

Testrunner has testcases for the browser UI; the list should probably be extended to cover more functionality. It would be good to run at least basic tests regularly, to catch regressions early. Before the release, more extensive test runs should be performed.

Features

• Current Gecko - many improvements since Mozilla 1.7
• Ship a final release with the various UI improvements since Mozilla 1.7
• Port frontend for Bug 2920 (Delete attachment from mail message in folder) to MailNews
  • done
• Enable SVG and Cairo (bug 294182)
  • in progress
• Enable MNG again (bug 18574)
  • this looks ready to go and could be a big PR win
• Enable calendar (bug 182076)
  • still too unstable to enable

For a second release:

• Unattended install for corporate deployment (bug 268740)
• SPNEGO support (bug 246861)
• Port to toolkit (bug 255807)
• Extension Manager (bug 272429)
• Use 7-zip compression for builds (bug 154965)
• Allow to easily migrate from/to Firefox/Thunderbird
• Nice splash-screen (since it isn't devs-only anymore)
• Port Thunderbird RSS/Atom reader to Seamonkey (Bug 255834])
• Enable XForms
• Improve the default theme (e.g. perhaps make Modern the default theme, see Bug 218329)
• Backout bug bug 281402(or part of it) to re-enable Xprint under GTK2+ builds
  • biesi: can't xprint still be enabled? should be as simple as --enable-xprint, right?
• Port Thunderbird's Inline Spell Checker frontend patch (Bug 278310) to MailNews
• Improve CSS rules for Message Grouping. Something like Bug 263255
• Begin to look at implementing the Secunia Security Advisories.
• Get rid of the IM button in the adressbook or add some useful UI. Since we are targeting end users there shoudn't be meaningless UI

...feel free to fill in more...

Talk about this