SeaMonkey Project Blog

Hi Everyone,

tl;dr; I’ve messed up majorly and need to revamp the infrastructure; meaning further delaying any hopes of releasing ANYTHING. Blame lies solely on me as I had contracted the serious case of “Thomas the Steam Engine”-itis.

That said, things probably aren’t that bad; I’m just so deep into this hole that I’ve dug the project into, I certainly can’t see the light of day.

Call me, Mole…  Mr. Mole.

— Long Missive —

I have taken up the mantle of the person who will bring bad news. (Could be good news, depending on your point of view, I guess).

But first, a confession.

I screwed up. I admit it. In the past, our old infrastructure’s CI was manageable; just had to fix up some code. But now, things have become untenable as the current build process is completely incompatible with the current CI code and changing the whole backend codebase is requires understanding the current build process (which has changed dramatically since Mozilla moved to using TaskCluster).
(NB: No.. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming Mozilla. Just saying that *I* can’t keep up with their changes, which probably speaks volumes of my competencies and delusional thought process.) So what is needed is revamping the whole CI code to make it work.

That said, since time is of the essence, I’ve consulted with the rest of the guys and we’re moving to Jenkins, since revamping the old CI code would require some hacking at an already Frankenstein-like code, so the technical debt needs to be paid.

Is it the end of the world? No. I’m just particularly unhappy that we’re in this situation; but hindsight is always 20/20. So yes, this means any future releases will depend on getting the whole build process encoded into whatever way Jenkins requires.

Also note that SeaMonkey needs to completely stop relying on Mozilla’s infrastructure (*every single thing*, including this blog, bugzilla… you name it.. we need to be off it) by end of the year.

Anyway, I sincerely apologize for the mess; both to every single one of SeaMonkey’s users (both past and present) and to my fellow devs (again, both past and present).   As part of my defense, last year, I thought (with the delusions of competencies) moving to Azure wouldn’t be that problematic and while I did get a ‘running’ (though not really building) infra, everything went crazy near the end of last year as I had realized the required builds and branches needed new tool chains; and building these toolchains required a lot of time and energy.  At the end… a failed attempt at keeping up to date with the whole build process.

So… the project is at a standstill.

In any event, I would like to thank everyone for their support in the past and continual support and infinite patience as this project continues to climb this steep (or as Richie from “Bottom” would say, “f’ing” vertical) hill/mountain.

*sigh*

:ewong

NB: In other words… Live and Learn.

Hi all,

(didn’t really have any quip to put in the topic..  so wrote that…  *shrug*)

We have finally started spinning 2.49.5.   This is going to be the most EPIC build process.  Why?  Oh…let me count the ways.

1. 2.49.5 will be spun on a totally new and unproven infrastructure (yay… ;/ )
2. 2.49.5 will require A LOT of trial and errors.
3. 2.49.5 isn’t going to be released that fast as we depend on three systems.  I’m hoping to get another system up to take up the builds.

Here’s the status of the build.

• The tagging process completed with a hiccup but it ‘should’ be ok.
• Current build(s): Linux32 [failed – in the process of being fixed]
• Win64 is not talking to the master so apparently Win64 has had a tiff with the master. (*sigh*  will have to convince those two to become friends again.)
• OSX64 is off doing its own thing (nightly..  need to redirect its attention to more pressing matters.)

I’ll update everyone as it progresses.

:ewong

Hi Everyone,

It’s been awhile since this blog was updated.  No, SeaMonkey hasn’t disappeared or gone.  We’re still plugging away at getting things done; but it’s been a very slow process, of which, we apologize.

The project is still alive and we’re all busy figuring out the whole shebang mess.

To answer a lot of people’s question: “What is going to happen to the project?  What’s in store?”

The tentative answer is: While we’re basing our release on ESR52 (with ESR60 being (afaicr) untenable),  we’re looking at a possible 2.53 or at worst, 2.57 as being the next ‘stable’ platform.

As for the ‘future’, we’re not as optimistic since a lot of our code is XUL based and a lot of the dependent code has been ripped out from the engine already.   So what you’re seeing in comm-central (and dare I even say, comm-beta) is terribly broken. [Expect an edit here, as I’m a bit out of the loop wrt the code.  I’ve been so knee deep in the infrastructure setup. ]  That said, what we will do to continue SeaMonkey is really up in the air.   Should we migrate off XUL and go quantum while trying to maintain some semblance of SeaMonkey, or should we just run as is until the engine completely fails or fork off the most stable Gecko XUL code and work on it?  [For the latter, some have said it will be the death knell for SeaMonkey as we do not have enough knowledge, expertise and resources to maintain such code.]

While this isn’t the right place to discuss this type of decision, I’m just putting it forth out in the open (in the name of transparency) so that users can think and discuss it on the newsgroups/mailing list.  After all, we are working on this project for our users (and ourselves, of course as we also do use SeaMonkey).

Thank you all for your patience and support.  It means a lot to the remaining members of the SeaMonkey dev team.

Best Regards,

:ewong

SeaMonkey’s infrastructure has officially been decommissioned.

May the memory of all these years of building SeaMonkey on these systems remain in the annals of SeaMonkey’s history and in all of the current and past contributors who had the fortune of administrating them (and fighting against their impulsive bustages).  An era has ended.

(Lights a candle for each of the following systems: )

• sea-hp-linux64-{2,13}
• sea-vm-linux32-{2,7}
• sea-mini-osx64-{1,4}
• sea-vm-win32-{1,4}
• sea-win32-{01,04}
• sea-master1
• sea-puppet
• the Windows loaner

A new era has begin.

Thank you for all the contributors and users who’ve supported this project and continue to do so despite the changes and the delays in releases.  We appreciate your continual support and patience as we get the new infrastructure up to par.

:ewong

SeaMonkey Release Engineer

Well…  all this preparation and migration has culminated to this final day after which our dear ol’ infrastructure will be gone forever.

It’s like saying goodbye to a friend…

For Auld Lang Syne… my dear… for Auld Lang Syne… We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet… for Auld Lang Syne…

I remember fondly of accessing the systems through the jump host…

“Parting is such sweet sorrow…  ”

:ewong

SeaMonkey Project’s own Lamenter.

Hi,

Some, if not all, of you may have wondered what the smeg was going on with the website.  It’s up.  Then errors out.  Up.. Errors out.

The reason is simple.

PEBCAK^H^H^H^H^H^H Teething errors with the website… yeah…

Seriously, sorry about the missing website.  It should stick now.

On my defense, I had to reverse-engineer the behaviour of the old website as I had no access to it.  This includes ‘how’ the website is setup, and how it’s built and the cronjobs necessary.  So I should’ve expected some teething errors.

:ewong

SeaMonkey Project’s own befuddler.

Dear All,

It is an end of an era as today is the last day of SeaMonkey’s old infrastructure.   Come 12th September, it’ll be shut down for good.  We’ve been using this infrastructure for more than ten years and it’s sad to see it go; but c’est la vie.

Now it’s fully on the SeaMonkey’s team to get the new infrastructure working and running.  What does this mean to everyone involved?  It means more involvement in getting things working, which unfortunately, isn’t the case right now.   The new infra is still going through the fixing part.

What this means is that any future releases will be delayed until this infrastructure is behaving properly.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Mozilla for all these years of helping us maintaining the infra as well as our multitudes of requests for items/bug fixes, etc.

I also would like to thank the users for your patience and understanding.

Best Regards

:ewong

Hi All,

Just want to announce that SeaMonkey 2.49.4 is finally out.  While not as hairy as the previous versions, it still had a lot of issues.

Sorry for the delay.

:ewong

Hi everyone,

I am spinning 2.49.4 right now.   Murphy *is* still around so that’s all I’m going to say. 😛

I’ll keep everyone posted.

:ewong