This week’s Random Notes

• Some notes and links for MozMill tests.
• A tool to make it easier to get diffs (aka “pbranch”).

Status Updates

Zach Church

Working on the "Reopen last tab" from the Go menu. As of 1/16/2009, I have the button working, and disabled if a tab has not yet been closed. On to testing!

Tim Miller

I'm working on getting the overlay icon working for windows 7 so that you can see the number of new mail messages on the taskbar icon, as you do on OSX. Fortunately, we had David Humphrey here to introduce us to working with the mozilla platform, who is also the person who created that functionality on the mac. He gave me some pointers and I'm off to start writing code.

Or so I thought. I've spent most of my time digging through code trying to find the right place to start writing. Not only do I need to put in the actual event handlers, I need to add code to the mozilla library to create a wrapper for the windows API function. The cool part about that is that someone may use it in firefox at some point, the bad part is that I have to figure out how to write it, and write it correctly. After two full day, I've come up with about 15 lines of code. Doesn't feel like much, but honestly, knowing where and what to write was a much larger challenge.

Marcel Guzman

I'm working on a few minor issues related to Thunderbird's new Activity Manager. The hope is that these minor issues will help me smoothly segway into a much larger Activity Manager-related task, the interactive status bar.

Thus far, I've learnt how the API works and a lot about how Mozilla is structured. Thanks again bwinton and humph for all your help there! I've also fixed the minor issues, and just need to work on tests.

It seems as though there do not exist any tests for the Activity Manager, so I will probably have to learn a lot about how tests are written in Thunderbird. Looking forward to that next week!

Kefu Zhao

I am working on "[Bug 461669] Reply to list: automatically determine From: address". During the code sprint, I was mainly trying to setup my work environment, which was not an easy thing to do under Windows. Here a big thanks to the script from Wei Xian Woo, who really makes this task easier.

Also, I was trying to get myself familiar with the current Thunderbird code structure. When I was tracing down to [Bug 461669], I found another bug that when the email header "List-Post" contains two more links, "reply to link" function will fail. Basically, it was caused by a misuse of the "Find" method of String.

Unfortunately, when I told Blake about this bug, he said the bug was already patched, but hasn't been committed yet. This news was a little bit frustrated, but anyways, I was able to trace down the error, which will defiantly help me finish [Bug 461669]. By calling "hg pull -u", which pull down all the current patch, the bug was fixed. :)

Now I move back to  [Bug 461669] .Wish me luck. :)

Good luck to the team. Nice meeting you all and I am sure we will do a great job this term.

Lindauson Hazell

I'm currently woking on resolving incorrectly enabled menu items in non-message related Thunderbird tabs. I submitted a first commit that resolves incorrectly activated menu items in the File menu. I'm going to be working on resolving the others. (Bug 495815)

Evan Stratford

I'm working on vCard import functionality for Address Book (this bug). 2.5 days, many heated IRC discussions, and roughly 800 lines of C++ later, I've managed to hook my nsVCardImport importer into the importer framework enough to get it displaying in the UI. Next steps:

• Get file dialog filters working - this must be done before the user can select any vCard files to import!
• Write a vCard parser with proper tests.
• Use said vCard parser to add entries into the Address Book.
• Write some Mozmill tests to test the interface properly.
• Get a patch up for review!

And one minor gripe: I haven't succeeded in getting IMPORT_LOG0 (PR_LOG, essentially) to produce any output, even with set NSPR_LOG_MODULES=all:5. Anyone else have success with PR_LOG?

Wei Xian Woo

I'm working on bug 408338 ("Thunderbird should have session restore"). I spent my days at Code Sprint understanding what we already do to persist/restore session state and developing a strategy to tackle this bug systematically -- see bugzilla for details.

Since I was developing on a Windows machine at the Code Sprint with Visual Studio and found no existing solution for generating a VC++ project file for Thunderbird, I decided to write a Python script to do it for me. I have shared this script with the team, but I will be posting a slightly revised version on my blog with a better description and slightly more detail some time this week so other Windows developers in the Mozilla community can take advantage of the script as well!

Who’s writing the blog post this week?

Zach Church