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!

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).