Changes to come

For the past few weeks, my main work has been involved with the address book rewrite. And a long job that has been—the patch touches over 30 files with a diff measuring some 1800 or so lines removed and about 1000 or so added (total savings seems to be in the 700's). And blimey, I've only modified one interface (to be fair, it is the most used interface...). Still, it isn't finished: import and palmsync almost undoubtedly break with this patch; LDAP may as well. Finally, it is recently bitrotted by another patch (given the scope of changes, bitrotting was likely to begin with).

My work was, however, sped along by another change (this one in the pipelines already). I added a deprecated attribute to XPIDL that allows me to mark a function as deprecated, rebuild, and see who uses that function. It is not reified to JS though (making JS usages as annoying as ever to work with). gcc 4.2 has a problem that makes this useless for virtual functions (essentially making it worthless for XPIDL); gcc 4.3 fixes this, but it is considerably more noisy in warnings and doesn't like linking with gcc 4.2 code. Go figure.

Change #3 is still in my conception pipeline. This one is to make make alltags a tad bit more correct. My idea is to only pipe dist/include and dist/idl into ctags (separately, though). The problem here is that XPIDL functions are typically declared with NS_DECL_NSIABITEM, for example, making it useless when I need to find the definition of functions. Then there is the other problem: I more often want to go to definitions than declarations. Ramping up my configuration magic in vim may be the way to go here.

Those were all stuff that I have worked on so far. Now comes the stuff that I plan to work on. The first on my list (not necessarily the first I will work on) goes back to the account manager. As anyone who has been reading mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird recently should have discovered by now, the account manager is the source of a fair number of complaints. Between the use of RDF and some confusing UI (especially with regards to RSS), it desperately needs an overhaul. Another problem in the account manager is somewhat difficult to see. It is the server manager as well; trying to use a server without creating an account is impossible, and even with the account, it is difficult.

Number 2 of this second class is involved with filters. Recently, I came across SIEVE, and decided to look into it. In short, it is a specification for a mail filter language. Since it is a series of RFCs (with some draft RFCs including discussion with mail servers), it would probably be supported elsewhere. This conceptual idea is to use Sieve as the filtering backend, which may fix some problems and would definitely open up a few new questions.

Several more things weigh in on my pontification list that I have already mentioned. I've started collecting a list of mailing lists for my webscrape idea; I also have two forums lined up as well for testing purposes. Continuing work on redesigning my blog is a given. De-morkification I've said in my recent posts, and my work in news filter overhauls are still stymied on bug 16913 going through. Ah well, they'll go through in time...