SeaMonkey:First Release

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Suiterunner

Ship happens. SeaMonkey 1.0 was released on January 30th, 2006.

SeaMonkey 1.0 release plan

SeaMonkey 1.0, the first release of our new project, is what a "Mozilla 1.8" application suite was meant to be. As such, it was released from the Gecko 1.8.0 base, which it shares with the Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5 releases.

We released an Alpha and a Beta release from the Mozilla 1.8.0 branch on the way to that 1.0 release:

• SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha was released from Gecko 1.8b4, paralleling the Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5 Beta1 releases done by Mozilla Foundation. While the basic codebase may be more beta than alpha quality, our new release process is not completely settled, we don't have our final Artwork yet and we have no dedicated release machines in place, so it's better to call this an early testing release or "Alpha".
• SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta was released from Gecko 1.8, like the Firefox 1.5 release. This testing release also incorporated our new Logo Artwork for the first time. A sample userAgent/About string for it is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051219 SeaMonkey/1.0b
• SeaMonkey 1.0 was shipped January 30th 2006 off the Gecko 1.8.0 branch, which might get a few security/stability fixes, but no big changes from what we shipped with beta. A sample userAgent/About string for it is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060130 SeaMonkey/1.0

We have 1.0.x nightly builds; please help us testing them!

The release processes are managed by the SeaMonkey Council, Chris Thomas is the release engineer in charge of that process.

The QA work needed for releases is overseen by our QA lead Andrew Schultz.

Release Checklist(s)

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 notes,
       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_> find people 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
• Port Thunderbird's Inline Spell Checker frontend patch (Bug 278310) to MailNews
  • done
• Revisit the Autoscroll issue. (Bug 22775])
  • done
• Nice splash-screen
  • done
• Enable SVG and Cairo (Bug 294182)
  • done

Talk about this