Ludovic's weblog

Major Update testday this coming Thursday , January 26th 2012

2012-01-20T10:36:41Z

On January 26th 2012 , the Thunderbird team is organizing a Testday. Our objective is to make sure that we aren't breaking anything for people that will update from 3.1.x to 10.

Instructions on how to participate and how to join are available here : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2012-01-26

Jeudis du Libre de Bruxelles - 01/12/2011 : Thunderbird, ce qui arrive et pourquoi ça arrive

2011-11-30T09:46:58Z

Ce premier décembre 2011, les Jeudis du Libre de Bruxelles sont
accueillis pour la première fois par le Betagroup Coworking et l'ICAB
et reçoivent Ludovic Hirlimann pour la seconde fois de la saison.

Au mois de septembre, Ludovic avait présenté le fontionnement général
de la messagerie électronique et les moyens de la sécuriser. Ce
mois-ci, il revient pour une présentation plus pratique de la mise en
oeuvre des moyens présentés lors de la première séance: Thunderbird, ce
qui arrive et pourquoi ça arrive, la mise en oeuvre de certificats SSL
avec CAcert, et de clés numériques avec GnuPG.

http://jeudisdulibre.be/

*Le thème de cette séance :*

Conférence:

Thunderbird, ce qui arrive et pourquoi ça arrive.

Atelier pratiques:

Devenir assureur CAcert.
Échanger des signatures de clés GnuPG.

L'animateur conférencier :

Ludovic Hirlimann (Mozilla).

*** Attention nouveau lieu! ***

Betagroup Coworking,

4 rue des pères blancs,
1040 Bruxelles.

Arrêt Arsenal. Tram 7, 25; Bus 34.

Merci au Betagroup Coworking et à l'ICAB.

Horaires

Date : 01/12/2011

Accueil : 18:30

Début de la présentation: 19:00

Fin de la présentation et des ateliers : 21:00

Après 21:00: diner dans le quartier.

Pour participer à la session

Merci de vous inscrire:

http://jdl-bruxelles-2011-decembre.eventbrite.com

Pour participer à la session CAcert:

Avoir un compte sur http://CAcert.org et en lire la documentation.
Imprimer des Cap forms (sous cap forms) et venir avec ces Capforms et des papiers d'identités.
Ensuite on crée une queue en face des assureurs.
Chaque assureur regarde remplie une Cap form (cf cap-5.pdf) et la garde.
En rentrant les assureurs donnes des points.
Plus on a de point plus les certificats que l'on peut obtenir sont forts et valides.

Pour participer à la session GnuPG :

Installer GnuPG .
Créer une paire de clefs.
Uploader sa clef sur un serveur de clefs.
Envoyer le fingerprint de sa clé à Ludovic avant 12:00 le 1er décembre: .

Lightning and Thunderbird testing week, a post mortem.

2011-11-22T10:09:48Z

Last week we had our last (to date) community testing effort and the focus was Thunderbird 10 and Lightning 1.0. This was a first for me, dealing with two products during the same week and dealing with a product I don't use too much. I was not too confident that the test cases available for Lightning were up to date - but I thought that some testing was better than none. So I did My usual call to testers using the too many ways we have to do that :

Mail to testers

Newsgroup post

blog post

mozillazine post

And I didn't do that on the same day but on the course of two weeks. And I got a bit stressed and worried because the numbers of answers I got was very low. And then Philipp posted on the Calendar blog and my mailbox got filled with people willing to spend some time testing.
The plan was to send instructions when I would get back from mozcamp in Berlin and start the testing effort. Unfortunately I came back sick and was in bed for most of the testing week. I did send instructions and then left my computer unattended for the week as I was sleeping and fighting fever. The instructions I sent did the job for most of the volunteers that had signed up for Thunderbird testing but were confusing to say the least for the many new comers who had signed up for Lightning.

I would like to apologize to the people who wanted to help but got confusing instructions f from me.
I would like to thanks standard8 for getting into #tb-qa and answering people.

And I would like to point out our results :

Thunderbird - 81% coverage and 15 bugs found

Lightning - 38% coverage and 4 bugs found

And I've learned a lot on something I thought I mastered so next time it won't happen the same way for sure.

Mozilla Camp Eu 2011

2011-11-21T17:37:56Z

Last week-end I had the pleasure to attend MozCamp Europe 2011 in Berlin, Germany. As always those events are for me the occasion to meet the people involved in the product I work on.

It was interesting to listen to old face that were ranting. It was nice to see and meet new people or people I wouldn't expect to see in Berlin (nice idea to mix an AMO editors meeting with the event). I arrived a bit late on the first evening, but not as late a some, so I had the pleasure to enjoy a german-like diner and the time to meet most of the french crowd that was around. Giving us a taste of history as our first social act was nice - even If i had seen the video before. Ended up having drinks with a few old timers and that did wrap up the evening.
Like in whistler I shared my room with Tonnes - a contributor from the Netherlands. Tonnes mind you translate most of the knowledge base article from both sumo and sumomo. While we chatted he told me that was roughly around 20 hours of his time devoted to the task on a weekly basis (a good part of it being sucked into following what Mozilla does and where it goes).
The next day started with a bunch of updates on where Mozilla was going and that was quite interesting - even if I skipped the end to go sign up some pgp keys with two Berliners.
The afternoon was pretty packed - with JB presenting's his vision of where Thunderbird will go. Then Protz giving a 101 demo on how to build and make interesting extensions for Thunderbird - Both presentation had full rooms (room name was mosaic) - which was better than what we had achieved at the last mozcamp. I then followed Florian's presentation of Instantbird - and I still owe him a why I prefer Adium email.
We ended the day having diner in a cave - diner was nice but the place was a bit crowded and very noisy for some. I did meet a new mozillian over diner - but I believe that it was more due to luck than anything else (big hello to mcsmurf).
The next day was more based around private conversation and introducing people to each other. Overall a very long week-end but very productive too. Of course I ended up taking pictures and they are available on flickr.

Test event centered around Thunderbird 10 and Lightning 1.0

2011-11-09T08:40:33Z

It's been a while since we had a testing event. Some of it was probably my fault as I needed to adjust myself to the new release process we adopted since Thunderbird 5.0. Since then I've been lonely testing releases and new features as they came out. It's time to spend a good amount of time testing Thunderbird more thoroughly. We will use litmus as our main testing tool. In litmus you will find groups of test (eg one for address book, one for imap, one for news). Each group is made of one or more tests that needs to be run. As I want to distribute the workload and not only have a few areas tested, I would like you to sign up and tell me that you want to participate to this event.

What is required to participate :

An email account that can be used for testing
a litmus account
an account on bugzilla.mozilla.org
some time in the week of 13Th November to 20th November 2011

What will the workflow of this event look like

You read this
you reply to it - telling me you want to participate
On the day the event starts (times will be Central European time) You'll receive an email with:

what to test (eg groups of test I've assigned to you)

a link to the test in litmus

a bugzilla bug number which we will use to track bug found during this event

more detailed instructions on how to use litmus and bugzilla

You organize yourself to run the tests when you have time

You do the tests and give us reports and file bugs if the tests aren't successful

That's it. I will Post results in the middle and at the end of the event.

At the same time we would also like to run the same kind of event for lightning as it's the most used extension with Thunderbird. The workflow will look exactly the same. Just make sure that you tell me you want to test Thunderbird, Thunderbird/Lightning or just Lightning.

Right now the number of people who signed up is below 10 and it would be nice if I could get a few more volunteers in order to be able to have a large coverage of our tests. The best way to reply to this is to send me an email.

Are you using Thunderbird in an enterprise environment ?

2011-10-30T12:13:45Z

If so we would like to get some feedback from you - see this Thread on the Thunderbird enterprise mailing list.

How I started being involved in mozilla

2011-10-15T08:18:52Z

Once upon a time I used to be a Desktop linux user , and OS/2 user and a BeOS user. Back in 1999, around the M8 release - Be Inc. did a port of mozilla. This meant that my favorite os would have a better browser than Netpositive that couldn't even render /.

At this time I was working for ITSgroup, installing, deploying Computer Associates software at clients - and my laptop was able to only run Linux or Windows. My home only had a slow modem with very pricey access fee to the net. So I decided that I could use the bandwidth available at work ( a whooping 2 MB ) to test Mozilla on either Linux or Windows and report bugs. I thought that fixing bugs on linux, windows would also fix bugs on the product Be would release.

And Be went to the toilet, and I switched to the then very nice toy os that Mac OS X 10.0 was. I tried to participate to opendarwin, tried mach-o builds when they were experimental. But Mozilla at that time was really unusable on mac os. But I kept using it on my work machines because of the tab feature. Trying to report bug when I could.

One day I stubble upon something called Chimera. Ho and that was able to browse the web, and it was fast, slick and efficient, so every now and then I would download the latest version and run it. I don't remember how, but at some point I made the connection with Camino and Mozilla - something I was familiar with. That was just before the release of Camino 0.7. The Camino effort almost got killed when Apple released Safari. Unfortunately Safari didn't let me log on my favorite site at that time the mighty ubix.org. So I kept using he browser that worked for me: Camino

In July of that same year, the mozilla/netscape teams got fired and I wanted Camino to make progress , so I started to annoy Mike Pinkerton, Simon Woodside to make Camino more a community effort. I started this blog for that purpose - see my post from that time in the mozilla/camino section. #camino appeared on irc.mozilla.org and we started working towards 0.8. A few months later the build requirement changed, and I couldn't help with dev so I started working on making l10n work for Camino. At the same time I needed a proper email client so I used Thunderbird and tried to report bugs.

In 2004 Tristan made more noise about Fosdem, and agreed to give me a ride back from Brussels if I attended. So I went and had a blast - I met Patrick the author of enigmail, Alex from svg and jssh fame.

In 2006 my personal life went upside down so I decided not to continue Camino related activities, I got a job offer in Holland from Alex who I had met at fosdem again in 2005 and 2006. I took the offer as QA lead for Joost a video client based on xulrunner. That started my professional life doing quality assurance. In 2008, we stopped doing mozilla related things and at fosdem I talked to Peterv and he simply said send a resume over if you want to do more Mozilla related things. That got me thinking - It reminded me david's email about the start of mozillamessaging and I ended up applying for their QA lead position. After tow rounds of interviews (I refused after the first round because I was starting to see someone and thought I wouldn't have the time to do a proper job) I started in February 2009 working full time on Thunderbird.

Finding firefox for Android slow ?

2011-09-27T07:50:22Z

Then I've got good news for you, using a nightly build will make anything you do on your mobile faster. To install it just read the instructions at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#Download_Nightly. The speed difference is very, very noticeable - worth installing.

Jeudi 1er Septembre 2011 - Chiffrement et signature numérique pour le courriel

2011-08-19T07:22:51Z

Le jeudi 1^er Septembre 2011 je présenterai les solutions disponibles sur le marché pour chiffrer et signer ses courriers électroniques. Cette présentation se fera dans le cadre des jeudis du libre à Bruxelles. Le plan de la présentation est plus ou moins le suivant :

L'envoi d'un email est un acte non sécurisé par défaut
Pourquoi signer
Pourquoi chiffrer
Méthodes disponibles, les pour , les contre
Exemple(s)

Les détails logistiques sont disponibles sur le site des jeudis du libre ou sur upcoming.org.

BrowserID support for Movabletype ?

2011-07-19T11:08:05Z

I'm looking for a movabletype plugin that would let me implement BrowserID on this blog. I've googled, I've twitted, and I've searched the movable type plugin directory but didn't find anything. Anybody interested in creating such a beast, to my knowledge the skills required are :

Bonus point if it supports earlier releases of Movabletype.

We need help from our users to figure out our topcrash for Thunderbird 5

2011-07-07T16:00:52Z

We (the Thunderbird team) released Thunderbird 5.0 about a week ago. It's currently being offered to 10% of our users as an update from 3.1.11. When we release new versions we try to monitor early upgrader feedback in bugzilla, in getsatisfaction and on a crash stat reporting page. Our current top crasher is related to Lightning and Windows.

None of the developers can currently reproduce the bug, so we are counting on our users to help us debug the issue so we can fix it.

Are you using Windows?

Are you using Lightning?

Did you upgrade to Thunderbird 5.0 and Lightning 1.0b4?

Did you crash after that update?

If the answer to all these question is yes - maybe you can help us fix this issue. You'll need to locate your CrashID as explained on our knowledge base article. And look it up on the crash-stats page.

If the signature is cal::UTC() you can help us - if not we'll get to fixing your bug later.
What we need to know is:

What were you doing when you crashed?

Do you use tasks?

What kind of calendar (or calendars) do you connect to?

Do you have a calendar tab open in Thunderbird?

Do you have a lot of events that are created in a different time zone?

Let us know those settings, by either living a comment here, or on bug 603416

Finally, and most importantly, do you crash often due to this issue?

If the answer to that last question is yes, try to follow the instructions at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/how_to_get_a_stacktrace_with_windbg to get a more complete stack trace or leave a comment in the bug and we will ask you to do a few things and that should let us fix the crash.

landfill.bugzilla.org

2011-06-24T11:28:14Z

A few times a day I end up getting bugmail from bugzilla.mozilla.org by someone trying and testing features of bugzilla (like the security one). People don't realize that every time a bug is open a good number of emails are going to be send to groups of people (the number of people in the group will depend on the bug, the place it's filled in bugzilla etc ...). And each of those people will loose a few seconds for each email. In the end it's a lot of time that could be used to fix issues, and make the product better.
We do understand that people want to try and test the bugzilla product - and we are offering a non production database , just designed for people who want to test features in bugzilla. That instance of bugzilla is available at http://landfill.bugzilla.org - please use it to do any testing you want.

Needed : contacts in the Italian administration doing IT

2011-05-24T11:45:25Z

The product I work on as an issue when dealing with certain mime types, in particular with application/pkcs7-mime. It seems the Italian state, is sending a lot of encrypted and signed emails using the S/mime standard. These emails are unusable in Thunderbird - our mime library copes on it's content. Meaning that Thunderbird is not really usable for many of our Italian users, because they can't deal with electronic paper work coming from their Administration. Italian is our 5th biggest used language, so we tried to fix this issue in order to make sure Thunderbird would work for our Italian users. Before committing the fix our S/Mime expert had doubts on the fact that the fix did the right thing.
So here we go committing the fix , asking and getting feedback - unfortunately after a week or so we've figured out that we regressed, and some things that used to work don't work anymore. So those regressions with the doubts our S/Mime expert has made us - we backed the patch out.
We would still love to have a solution for our users. as fixing the client and receiving end seems difficult, we would like to find out what software is sending those malformed message. Once we know that - we could probably contact them and help them fix the issue.

I'm posting this in order to reach out to someone who knows someone that works as an IT staff for the Italian administration - so we can figure out what software they use and let the administration that something is wrong with it. You can leave a comment in the bug, or if you want things to stay private send me an email.

Update
I've been told that they use Openpec , I would love to get confirmation of that information.

Where to find build ID in miramar and the upcoming Thunderbird 3.3

2011-05-19T08:19:26Z

As some of you might have noticed we are following Firefox's new about box design. Our new about box looks like :

When reporting bugs it's nice to post the build id in the bug. A build id is a unique identifier that let the people know exactly which version of Thunderbird you are running. The build id looks like Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:5.0a2) Gecko/20110516 Thunderbird/3.3a4pre. This used to be in the about dialog. Now it's in the help menu in the Troubleshooting information page. And it looks like :

ISP easily remove the burden of configuring email clients

2011-05-17T11:43:14Z

As some of you know, I spend a good deal of my day reading bug comments , replying to some, trying to understand why the user is seeing a bug and I'm not.
Since the release of Thunderbird 3.0 (actually since one of the betas), Thunderbird has the ability to easily setup an email account. Users just enter their email address and their password and we'll figure out the proper parameters. This work as been picked up by other email clients : evolution , kmail and Android's k9 (it's a gsoc project this year). The documentation on how it works is available at the following url : https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration. To make version 3.0 usable we populated the database and then we added the hosted mechanism.
Now and then we see some ISPs, coming to us and asking us to be integrated in the Database, to which most of the time we answer to implement the hosted mechanism. And here's why we tell them to host the file :

The ISP is in control - so when something needs to be changed it can do it immediately without having to go through our process (which is slow).

We can't verify all the isp's config over time - so if something breaks because the ISP implements a news feature (SSL, Imap) etc. It will take some for us to figure it out (if we do) and make the change.

Having a hosted file doesn't change the way we treat the ISP. It only changes the speed at which the user gets her account configured; it's faster since we try the hosted file before our database.

Conclusion is fairly easy, if you're an ISP and want to implement our Autoconfiguration mechanism in a timely and controlled manner - just host the xml file.