September 2006 Entries

Future versions of OpenOffice.org will come bundled with Mozilla's Thunderbird email client and Lightning calendar application. The open source office suite is also planning to revamp its system for building and installing extensions by the end of the month by introducing an extensions system like that of Mozilla's Firefox browser. The process of developing, selecing and managing extensions will be standardised and simplified, according to Charles H. Schulz, the lead of OpenOffice.org's Native Language Confederation.

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Brendon Chase writes:
There are a few good JavaScript debuggers out there and a few are integrated with popular IDEs but a new project, code-named Helper Monkey, led by Sun Microsystem's employee, Brendan Gregg, caught my eye. Project Helper Monkey brings the power of DTrace, a tracing framework originally created by Sun for Solaris to JavaScript. Gregg says he is doing this by utilising user statically defined tracing interface(USDT) probes to the Spider Monkey JavaScript engine, used by Mozilla-based browsers. According to Gregg he has added probe calls to "observe JavaScript function calls, object creation, and the destruction(garbage collection, and script execution. I've also written several DTrace scripts to report probe activity".

Read about DTrace meets JavaScript

Talkback or Quality Feedback Agent is a small piece of software embedded in Mozilla that gathers data about what is happening in Mozilla when it crashes. Such information helps Mozilla developers to quickly isolate the cause of a crash and then correct it. Talkback is now about to be replaced by Airbag, an open-source multi-platform crash reporting system that Google and Mozilla are working in cooperation on. According to Benjamin Smedberg Airbag will enable the Mozilla developers to get more, faster and more reliably data if the users Mozilla application crashes. Read the entire blog entry. Read more about the Airbag project itself here where you can also download the source.

J. Paul Reed Build/Release Engineer at the Mozilla Corporation writes:

Is the Mozilla Project switching to Subversion? There have been many discussions in the past few months about the version control system that the Mozilla project entrusts its code to. It's safe to say there's a desire from most of the community to thank CVS for taking good care of our source code - for the most part - and move into the 21st century. Obviously, such a move is a big deal, and impacts the very core of the Mozilla Project: our source code. It's not a decision to be made lightly, or by a limited subset of people. It's a project-wide discussion. The first part of these discussions has already taken place, and a set of Project's requirements for a version control system has emerged. As they wiki page notes, some of these requirements are in conflict, so they represent a utopian ideal of version control systems. But no decision has been made on which version control system to switch to, nor have any concrete plans (schedules, etc.) even been considered.

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Also read the Version Control System Requirements for Mozilla