Silver's Simple Site - Weblog - 2005 - July

- Arthur Dent, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

You all know what I mean.

On a slightly better note, mozilla.org finally decided to start telling developers what is going on. About time, too.

Everything: you use them almost all the time when using the mouse, and pretty often when using the keyboard - though it varies depending on the app.

ChatZilla's menus have been evolving over time since they first appeared, probably at least 5 years ago now, and are a in a bit of a mess. As part of fixing this, I've drawn up the current menus in the Mozilla Wiki. If anyone wants to move stuff around, into the "right" place, and add notes, they're welcome to, after all, it's a Wiki.

Begining build of ChatZilla 0.9.68.6...
  WARNING: output XPI will be overwritten.
  Checking XPI structure.....            done
  Checking JAR structure..               done
  Updating Firefox Extension files.....  done
  Updating Mozilla Extension files....   done
  Constructing JAR package..C:\Program Files (x86)\Cygwin\bin\perl.exe (3972): *** recreate_mmaps_after_fork_failed
ERROR (0)
Cannot determine cygwin mount points. Exiting.
      3 [main] perl 3972 fixup_mmaps_after_fork: WARNING: VirtualProtectEx to return to previous state in parent failed for MAP_PRIVATE address 0x1ED0000, Win32 error 87
    538 [main] perl 3972 fixup_mmaps_after_fork: WARNING: VirtualProtect to copy protection to child failed forMAP_PRIVATE address 0x1ED0000, Win32 error 487
    680 [main] perl 3972 fixup_mmaps_after_fork: ReadProcessMemory (2nd try) failed for MAP_PRIVATE address 0x1ED0000, Win32 error 487
C:\Program Files (x86)\Cygwin\bin\perl.exe (3972): *** recreate_mmaps_after_fork_failed
      6 [main] perl 2916 fork_parent: child 3972 died waiting for dll loading

And thus ended my Cygwin Perl installation. No matter of rebaseall-ing or complete Cygwin reinstalls could fix it, and I don't even understand precicely what the error is.

So a short while later, I had myself an ActiveState ActivePerl install, perl-cygwin.sh (a wrapper I wrote to use ActivePerl in places expecting Cygwin Perl), and some tweaks to makexpi.sh to let me specify the Perl engine (save me doing path & symlink hacks). And thus it did build! Yay!

So much for early-June. Well, the tree is still frozen, which doesn't help at all. Plus reviews are slower than expected. We're also not going to get 0.9.69 out any time soon at all - the next release will be 0.9.68.6, hopefully not too far away now.

We are, however, making slow but steady inroads into the bug list, and have a few people outside the 'core' (Robert Ginda, Samuel Sieb and myself) who are doing patches and generally helping a lot. It sounds like we're going to get a better (ish) reconnect system shortly, too.