Report: bezilla day of coding
First and most important: a big "Thank You!" to everyone who showed up and helped on yesterday's "day of coding" event. This is the first time in recent memory I've seen fyysik, tqh, neilx, beteka, mmadia, koki, Drake (a BeOS dev returning after hiatus), [Beta] and others all on the #bezilla IRC channel at the same time. Everyone contributed, everyone worked hard. Special thanks to fyysik, who helped despite feeling ill.

Our efforts focused on identifying bugs that were fixed on the trunk but not on the branch, then back-porting these fixes so as to release a stable and useable Firefox 2.0 at the same time as the rest of the world gets their versions. The result is an up-to-date Bon Echo (Firefox 2.0) release candidate build, available now on the BeBits "Firefox Bleeding Edge" page.

Neilx also created a new Firefox 3.0 tracking bug and moved all the pesky, longstanding entries (i.e. printing) still needing to be fixed. Neilx also kept a running wiki page that documented our discussions.

We also discussed incorporating tqh's new, lightweight nspr. Because some recent problems might be related to the increased use of threading, tqh agreed to take a detailed look at the nspr test suite and insure this new nspr is as solid as possible before we incorporate it.

After we satisfied ourselves that we'd done what we could with Bon Echo, discussions turned towards isolating the nasty problems plaguing our current trunk builds: crashes at startup and "freezes". It was pointed out on IRC that the "freeze" problem may have been around a long time because its symptoms sound similar to that discussed in a Chatzilla bug filed a long time ago. Drake and neilx looked at bdb screenshots of the browser in its frozen state. (see http://www.sheltonfamily.org/bdbScreenshots/screen02.png through screen20.png if you also want to puzzle on this.)

If you attended and I left you out of this message, please don't be offended - just blame it on my overloaded brain! I hope everyone found this session as enjoyable as me. Let's try to do it again sometime soon!