This week’s Random Notes

• Wei's QuickStart Guide

Status Updates

Zach Church

I finally got the mozmill tests to pass on my machine. I believe they started failing when the screensaver came on/the screen turned off, so I'm getting everything to pass without my patch applied. When I run the tests with my patch applied, the tests stop (the Thunderbird window sits idly while waiting for tests to run). So I'm now working on that. The tests I've written pass, but some of the other tests don't run.

Tim Miller

Marcel Guzman

Kefu Zhao

This week I didn't spend much time on Thunderbird because I was busy with other course work and I am waiting for the patch review result from Blake. Meanwhile, I have found the person who will be my second patch reviewer after I hear from Blake.

Lindauson Hazell

I made last week post today... you want to start there. 

I've been searching comm-central for a while, and I haven't found another instance of any of the missing menu command items. So where am I now?

I am assuming I just have to include the missing control elements, but I don't know what to call them. I was looking for other instances of these elements. I am going to try two things:

1. Guess the handles for the missing commands. 

2. Or find where they originate, and use that.

I havent found where these are initiated, so I'm doing option one unless I get any suggestions. 

[Bug [ 495815]]

Evan Stratford

Standard8 pointed out a number of stylistic issues with vCard import; I fixed those up in the hope that this will get pushed sometime over the next week and a half. Unfortunately, it seems that the import framework suffers from deep-rooted thread-safety issues; it doesn't help that Mork, unlike sqlite, is not threadsafe.

After reading Standard8's reply on vCard import, I finally became frustrated enough with Thunderbird's terrible yacc-based RFC 2425 parser to write my own. This patch provides (de-)serialization of RFC 2425 directory entries into a data structure designed to support simple lookups on types and parameters; the lookups return an array of matching values, thereby supporting the possibility that one type is mapped to several values (e.g. if a vCard identifies multiple names, addresses, telephone numbers, etc.) It's implemented as an XPCOM component so that it can be directly used in frontend.

(Maybe it's a bit late to be undertaking projects like this; that said, even if it doesn't push in time, maybe someone will be sufficiently motivated to take it and run with it.)

I'm blocked on review at this point. If anyone at Mozilla is reading this: please review at least one of these patches so I can move forward!

Wei Xian Woo

I'm pleased to report that the bug I've been working on, bug 408338 has been resolved and my patch has been pushed to comm-central by :asuth on March 30th.

Although I did not implement all of the features originally requested by :justdave, :asuth marked the bug as RESOLVED FIXED and noted that new bugs should be opened for the other leftover features.

Since this week is my last week working on work-for-credit, I decided that I'll put together a "quick start guide" for future students (or anyone else) working on Thunderbird. I'll probably put everything up here (on a separate page) when I'm done and link to it from the UCOSP blog.

Who’s writing the blog post this week?

Kefu Zhao