Sent out my Mozilla Committer’s Agreement today!

Please consult the release announcement for a complete list of changes.

Known bugs:
Inline schemas don’t work. As a workaround, use an external schema. (bug #567628)

But for some time now I got a Python exception: gaierror: (-2, 'Name or service not known').  And no, it’s not my name servers, those are up and running. Causing the problem was the following line:

 boundary = mimetools.choose_boundary()

Somehow gethostbyname() screwed up (we were switched to new DHCP servers recently) and looking up our own hostname failed. At least it took me some time to look at the right place for that exception. When opening an URL you expect such an exception usually not inside a function giving you a MIME boundary :-)

After all, the XForms builds for Linux are up and running again, now for mozilla-1.9.2 and mozilla-central. Please give these builds a try and report any regressions you find as we plan to release a version for Firefox 3.6 around March.

Another quick note: XForms for Firefox 3.6 is on its way.

The XForms AddOn for Firefox 3.5. Download it now while it’s fresh :-)

The XPI contains binary components for Windows (32bit) and Linux (32 and 64bit).

Remember: this is an experimental development snapshot, so don’t be surprised if it kills your cat. But it should still be more stable than the previous release version, as we fixed some crash bugs.

I also added a bit of documentation on how to build Mozilla XForms from source at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Enjoy!

Mozilla switched from CVS to Mercurial (hg) with this release and removed the XForms extension from the core tree. We got a new hg repository, but it’s still empty (http://hg.mozilla.org/xforms). So what’s to do now?

1. Convert the extensions/xforms directory from CVS to hg.
2. Create a new hg repository on hg.mozilla.org for schema-validation and convert extensions/schema-validation to hg.
3. Make the XForms extension build with Firefox 3.5 (there has been some cleanup work towards Mozilla2).

To get started, I did the CVS to hg conversion for XForms and schema-validatio n.The results are available at http://philipp.wagner.name/hg. I mainly followed Gijs instructions for converting Venkman, so that’s the short version of how I did it:

1. Check out existing code from CVS
   $> cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co -d xforms-cvs mozilla/extensions/xforms
2. Make sure your ~/.hgrc file contains the following lines:
[extensions]
hgext.convert=
mq =

   [convert]
hg.usebranchnames=0
hg.clonebranches=1

3. Convert all branches
   $> hg --encoding utf8 convert xforms-cvs xforms-hg-initial
   This may take a while.
4. Remove the [convert] section from your ~/.hgrc file
5. Create the authors.txt file with a mapping of CVS usernames to names and e-mail addresses.
   For a list of authors use
   cd xforms-hg-initial/default && hg log | grep "user:" | sort | uniq | cut -c14- > ../../authors.txt
6. Convert the default repository to the final XForms repository:
   $> hg --encoding utf8 convert --authors authors-merged.txt xforms-hg-initial/default/ xforms-hg-final

I chose to “merge” authors, by mapping multiple e-mail addresses to one (the current one). For schema-validation I did exactly the same and the result is available  in my hg repository.

The final step is go get it all compiling. Using hg annotate I found the relevant bug reports that changed things and I made the required changes to XForms, which resulted in the patch attached to bug #485734.

Now the XForms extension compiles and works as it did before on Firefox 3.5. What’s left is to get all those outstanding patches into the code. To check it out, use

$> hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1 mozilla-1.9.1
cd mozilla-1.9.1
$> hg clone http://philipp.wagner.name/hg/xforms extensions/xforms
$> hg clone http://philipp.wagner.name/hg/schema-validation extensions/schema-validation
Then building works as it did before.

http://philipp.wagner.name/mozilla-xforms

Building Mozilla on OpenSolaris is fairly straightforward, simply follow https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Solaris_Build_Prerequisites. I needed to disable the crash reporter (but that’s not needed for XForms anyways).

<em:targetPlatform>Linux_x86-gcc3</em:targetPlatform>

The extension manager uses this information to determine if the addon will work on your platform. Unfortunately, this broke our build scripts and the nightly XPI refused to install.

A similar issue came up with the Firefox 3 release build, which didn’t work with Firefox 3.0.1 any more.

Both issues are fixed. Please re-download the XForms XPI and you should be ok.