Updates

So, as May draws to a close, I have some updates on my mozilla work. First off is the pain I have been enduring as I work on listarchive. As of right now, I can create an account through the account wizard, and have it show up in the folder list without anything blowing up (which is not trivial). It turns out that the lack of the folder being initialized through RDF was that I retrieved it from a direct create instance instead of retrieving it from the RDF service. With a few more functions, I could probably avoid the RDF service, but until jminta finishes his war on RDF, it's just as well to use RDF and have things work magically. Of course, listarchive still requires some modification of sources to work, and don't even think about asking me to port it to Thunderbird 2, it's bad enough on trunk!

In addition, I have put some quality time in with my documentation of creating new account types. A lot more exists in my local work than exists on said page in part because I want to have working prototypes before committing to a guide, and in part because I need to make sure I'm not relying on deep-level unreliable code before posting.

Part 3 of work concerns documentation. If you rely heavily on mxr, you may have noticed that over the past week or so, some idl files got some nifty diagrams. These diagrams are created by doxygen (db48x is so nicely hosting them). You can generate these diagrams and doxygen documentation by typing make documentation from the root makefile. It is helpful to include this update to mozilla, and this update to doxygen. The mozilla update squelches some problems and changes some options to make documentation look better. The doxygen update makes doxygen like mozilla's IDL files better. If you want more tips on documentation, this site is a good starting place. (Writing some mozilla documentation guides is creeping up on my todo list as well).

Various other small things: I've been working on the address book rewrite some more. I have some updates to fakeserver related to writing some tests for old news subscription bugs, and to fix some bugs in code that was never tested. Updating morkreader, doing some pref analyses of de-mork of panacea.dat. I've even found time to start maintaining an account manager rewrite proposal.

Break time's over, here weI go!

Visual Studio and Mozilla

Visual Studio and Mozilla, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G… Okay, maybe they're not kissing, but I'm getting them to like each other a whole lot more. I have a quick-and-dirty script that creates the filter list for the .vcproj from the mozilla directory. It appears, however, that mozilla has something on the order of 23000 .cpp, .c, .idl, and .h files, which makes loading the class viewer a bit slow. It also takes quite a bit of time to load the project in the first place.

Right now, my script only loads .cpp, .c, .idl, and .h files into the project, and does so dumbly. Version 1.0 will probably read the Makefile.in files to determine which directories we shouldn't look into, based on a simple heuristic of GNU_CXX being undefined, and OS_ARCH equalling WINNT; I may make some broad-based assumptions about platforms as well (don't include MOZ_THUNDERBIRD unless we're thunderbird, e.g.). It will also prune "empty" directories; in this regard, perhaps generating the folder tree from the output would be easier.

Still to do is to set up options such that clicking "Build" or "Debug" does The Right Thing™. I'd also like to investigate some performance problems, but that's a long ways away. Eventually, I'd like to hook up the project file to a customized add-in that adds mercurial checkout support and adds/removes the files as happens in the hg repo (but it won't run those commands: I'm assuming people are using shared-source trees here).

Announcing Start of Listarchive!

Last night, I started work on the first of my triad of extensions detailed in this earlier post, listarchive. So I can't come up with a good name. The most up-to-date information will be available at this web page, but I will summarize some key points here.

listarchive is an extension that first and foremost aims to provide sane access to mailing list archives as if they were a simple folder in Thunderbird (and probably Seamonkey as well). From a certain user request, it is likely I will touch on other aspects of mailing lists as well in this extension, e.g., the desired "Reply to List" feature. In addition, however, I will also be using my experience with developing this extension to write a guide to developing extensions involving more complex operations in Thunderbird.

The extension, however, is still very much in the design phases. I would very much welcome any feedback to be sent to Pidgeot18+listarchive@gmail.com (with the "+listarchive" component, it helps me triage replies). Specific pieces of information I am looking for at this point:

• Mailing list archive URIs; I ask in advance to not send any more mailman URIs (unless it happens to be in a different language than English), as I have several already. I am most interested in accumulating a diverse supply of mailing list implementations and international versions to best determine what impact internationalization plays on list archives.
• Ways in which you think a mailing list archive should tie into regular email. For example, I believe it should translate a mailing list URI reference (e.g., http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-May/014646.html) into a link to open the message up as a TB email message.
• Any questions or suggestions for UI (this comes more into play once I have some prototypes working).
• Any other question you may have (related to listarchive). I'm quite willing to answer them.

Thanks in advance for any comments you send me. I'm also hoping that this will work out well (no reason it shouldn't).

An Update on Life

So I am quite happy today—then again, I'm always happy, but I'm happy for a specific reason today. Over the weekend, I finally got my new laptop. Now, it's not about to start running Crysis anytime soon, but it's quite good for a mid-range laptop, especially now that I'm determined to do things right.

Step one was to install Linux; I use Debian more for historical reasons than anything else, but it works. This time, I didn't manage to accidentally corrupt the Windows' NTFS tree thereby requiring a reinstallation, nor did I try to netinstall off of a wireless connection. However, wireless has proved as daunting a task to solve as it did the last time I tried to do it. After much finessing and going everywhere for information, the irksome driver finally worked under ndiswrapper randomly today. Still requires a lot of manual intervention, but at least I know how to get it to work.

Also fixed today were two irksome problems. My resolution is now back up at the comfortable 1280x800 instead of an annoyingly fat 1024x768. The mouse is now configured to give me a middle click when I click both left and right buttons, a boon for the touchpad. Finally, the most irksome of my problems was the inability to use <Alt>-# to switch screens in irssi; even that's been fixed.

I don't think I did too badly on those two exams I took today that I should have been studying for instead of setting up my laptop, so that's reassuring. Mozilla's building fine right now (I'm waiting for libgklayout.so to link so I can laugh in its face!); scp'ing my data from my old machine seems to be progressing smoothly.

That said, I've still got things to do. I'm planning on finally getting around to requesting CVS privs today. fluxbox still demands some configuration, and laying down on the carpet for lack of desk space is beginning to aggravate my elbows. Hey, libgklayout.so finished building, and I didn't even notice it. There's also the Vista thing of sides to shore up. So far, the only good thing about Vista that I can find is that it comes with better games than XP. I haven't tested the games I've actually paid for yet, though...