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David Ascher  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 5:53 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.planning, mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird, mozilla.dev.apps.calendar
Followup-To: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: David Ascher <david.asc...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:53:49 -0800
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 5:53 pm
Subject: Thunderbird 3 Planning
It's time to define the Thunderbird 3 plan.  I've spent a fair bit of
time learning about the state of affairs and talking to many people, and
I feel I've accumulated enough information to start this process.

Note: I'm cross-posting this to the planning, calendar and thunderbird
newsgroups, but expect discussion on the thunderbird newsgroup and have
set followup-to accordingly. There will be a summary post in the
planning newsgroup if the final plan differs significantly from the one
outlined here.

The long-term roadmap of Thunderbird is still in flux, but there are
four high-level points which drive my thinking about Thunderbird 3:

1. Thunderbird's impact is proportional to its user count.  Thus driving
adoption is my primary concern.  Our current user base is very
significant (many millions of mostly quite satisfied users), but the
number of possible users of Thunderbird is orders of magnitude greater
than our current reach.

2. The reasons why people don't choose to use Thunderbird are varied,
but two primary reasons appear to be: the lack of a built-in calendar
integration (compared to Outlook for example), or a search experience
that doesn't match that offered by competitors (gmail and Mail.app for
example).

3. In addition, Thunderbird's codebase has a fair bit of technical debt
due to insufficient resourcing over the years, which has led to a
codebase which has too many scary bits, not enough test coverage, and
isn't yet able to leverage the ongoing platform improvements.  In
addition, while communications clients are by nature great targets for
extension authors, the current codebase isn't extension-friendly enough,
making it too hard to build installation-specific features or experiment
with new feature ideas.

4. A fair number of Thunderbird changes have already landed on trunk,
including some important bug fixes, by a variety of contributors.  
There's appropriate pressure to ship an update to Thunderbird 2 to take
advantage of those and of the platform improvements.

With all that as background, I propose:

* Goal: to have at public milestone build of Thunderbird 3 in 2008.  
Thunderbird 3's overall aim is to significantly grow its user base
worldwide, as well as build a strong foundation for later Thunderbird
releases.

* Release-defining features:
 - an integrated calendaring feature, based on Lightning
 - a better search experience, especially for message content searches
 - a better overall user experience

* Less user-visible but important goals include:
 - Significant headway on getting rid of Mork and RDF
 - A concerted effort to improving the extensions ecosystem for
Thunderbird, including refactorings, FUEL, developer documentation, and
user experience
 - Better test coverage and performance metrics in place to support
refactoring goals

There will be of course lots of other bug fixes and enhancements
(patches welcome ;-))

* Schedule: Figuring out the schedule at this stage is hard, as it will
depend on who shows up with energy and talent.  I would like to set some
placeholder milestones for discussion, however:

 - alpha builds in Q1
 - beta builds without calendaring starting in Q2
 - beta builds with calendaring starting in Q3
 - widely useful builds by Q4 (although whether they're branded
"release" will depend on quality, as always).

We're revise the schedule as we gain knowledge.

* Thunderbird 3 work will happen on trunk, with branching strategy to be
figured out closer to the endgame (and reviewed next when 1.9 is cut),

* The Mailnews/Thunderbird folks and the Calendar folks will have to
figure out how to best allocate dev and testing effort on the
calendaring features, how we support Sunbird, etc.

Given the scope of the work, the aggressive schedule, and the amount of
new feature develoment, integration and stabilization work involved,
help of all kinds is more than welcome!  Thanks in advance for any input
you may have, either on process or on deliverables.

The central wiki page for Thunderbird 3 is
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Thunderbird3.  IRC discussion will
take place in #maildev.  The newsgroup/mailing list of record for Tb3 is
mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird.

I look forward to the discussion!

-- David Ascher


 
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Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.)  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 6:18 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: "Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.)" <eddy_n...@startcom.org>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:18:17 +0200
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 6:18 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
Hi David,

This plan looks to me overall as modest and doable, with the right set
of priorities to prepare for future and bolder goals and aims. Perhaps
the time line could be squeezed a little bit in order to have a release
in 2008, considering that Lightning has improved quite a bit lately.
However the plan looks realistic and serious to me.

--
Regards

Signer:         Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd. <http://www.startcom.org>
Jabber:         start...@startcom.org <xmpp:start...@startcom.org>
Blog:   Join the Revolution! <http://blog.startcom.org>
Phone:          +1.213.341.0390


 
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Sergey Yanovich  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 6:57 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Sergey Yanovich <ynv...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:57:34 +0200
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 6:57 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

This may also be cool:
* Improved administrator experience:
- MSI;
- Group Policy Options.

There is a thread 'Firefox for Corporations' in m.d.platform, which
fully applies to Thunderbird. Please check bug 231062 for MSI patches :)

--
Sergey Yanovich


 
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Gary Kwong  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 7:02 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Gary Kwong <nth1...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:02:19 +0800
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 7:02 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

> - alpha builds in Q1
> - beta builds without calendaring starting in Q2
> - beta builds with calendaring starting in Q3
> - widely useful builds by Q4 (although whether they're branded "release"
> will depend on quality, as always).

That will also depend on the timeframe that Calendar hits 1.0, though I
think it's projected for 2008 as well.

I'm of the opinion that the first beta should have already included
Lightning if it's one of the main pillars of the Thunderbird 3 release.
What's the point of calling it a beta when one of the main backbone
features is not present?

I am leaning towards the possibility of including Lightning 0.9 in an
Alpha / Beta 1 build, as a form of "dress rehearsal" for 1.0.

> * The Mailnews/Thunderbird folks and the Calendar folks will have to
> figure out how to best allocate dev and testing effort on the
> calendaring features, how we support Sunbird, etc.

There's substantial code that overlaps with Lightning, and also there's
code that doesn't. If 100% of Lightning's tested to work fine, chances
are that 60%++ of Sunbird already works well, the other 40% being
non-overlapping stuff. (something to keep in mind for QA)

Gary Kwong


 
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David Ascher  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 7:05 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: David Ascher <dasc...@mozilla.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:05:57 -0800
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 7:05 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
Sergey Yanovich wrote:
> This may also be cool:
> * Improved administrator experience:
> - MSI;
> - Group Policy Options.

> There is a thread 'Firefox for Corporations' in m.d.platform, which
> fully applies to Thunderbird. Please check bug 231062 for MSI patches :

Thanks for the note.  I'm certainly interested in figuring out the
various "enterprise" requirements.  In addition to MSI and Group Policy
issues, there are update management issues, as well as UI-limiting ideas
like those outlined in bug 414301.

We should discuss this on the community-enterprise list, however -- I'm
still trying to figure out how many sub-communities there are trying to
tackle organizational deployments of Thunderbird, and which of the
requirements are highest priority.

--david


 
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Myk Melez  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 7:08 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Myk Melez <m...@mozilla.org>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:08:37 -0800
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 7:08 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

David Ascher wrote:
> It's time to define the Thunderbird 3 plan.  I've spent a fair bit of
> time learning about the state of affairs and talking to many people, and
> I feel I've accumulated enough information to start this process.

To me this looks like a great plan, appropriately scoped but with real
and significant progress and promise for Thunderbird futures.  I second
Eddy's desire for a final release this year, but my reading of your
proposal is that it plans for exactly that outcome, just with a bit of
hedging given the difficulty of making that prediction and the desire
for a quality- rather than merely date-driven release.

-myk


 
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David Ascher  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 7:19 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: David Ascher <dasc...@mozilla.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:19:14 -0800
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 7:19 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
Myk Melez wrote:
> David Ascher wrote:

>> It's time to define the Thunderbird 3 plan.  I've spent a fair bit of
>> time learning about the state of affairs and talking to many people, and
>> I feel I've accumulated enough information to start this process.

> To me this looks like a great plan, appropriately scoped but with real
> and significant progress and promise for Thunderbird futures.  I second
> Eddy's desire for a final release this year, but my reading of your
> proposal is that it plans for exactly that outcome, just with a bit of
> hedging given the difficulty of making that prediction and the desire
> for a quality- rather than merely date-driven release.

Gee, I'm that transparent. ;-)

I'm very keen to see a public release in 2008.  But it's a foolish dev
manager who sets scope and schedule with absolutely no visibility on
available resources =)

While adding people to a late project makes it later, having too few
hands on keyboards makes it hard to produce good releases -- there's a
careful balance to be found.

My plan is to focus on getting as many bright people interested in
working on it as soon as possible, and with enough planning, enthusiasm,
luck, and the right discipline regarding scope creep, we may just get
there...

--david


 
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JoeS  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 8:56 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: JoeS <joesab2...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:56:46 -0500
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 8:56 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

Myk Melez wrote:
> David Ascher wrote:
>> It's time to define the Thunderbird 3 plan. I've spent a fair bit of
>> time learning about the state of affairs and talking to many people,
>> and I feel I've accumulated enough information to start this process.

> To me this looks like a great plan, appropriately scoped but with real
> and significant progress and promise for Thunderbird futures. I second
> Eddy's desire for a final release this year, but my reading of your
> proposal is that it plans for exactly that outcome, just with a bit of
> hedging given the difficulty of making that prediction and the desire
> for a quality- rather than merely date-driven release.

> -myk

Ah.. regarding quality, might we address the issue of core code changes that affect apps like thunderbird.
Since https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385740 which was a great change for Firefox myk, the trunk
for Tbird was severely impacted. If you save an action, as far as opening a link or calling a helper app, there
is absolutely no way to edit that pref. Apart from saving your mimeTypes.rdf (or a null version of same) you are
stuck with your decision.
These things are constantly cropping up, some serious, some not.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413200 has lingered now for a week or so.

-- JoeS


 
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Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.)  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 9:07 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: "Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.)" <eddy_n...@startcom.org>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 04:07:08 +0200
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 9:07 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
JoeS wrote:
> These things are constantly cropping up, some serious, some not.
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413200 has lingered now for a week or so.

Well, a bug with so much activity in one week...I wouldn't call that
"lingering" ;-) I guess your expectations are quite high...

--
Regards

Signer:         Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd. <http://www.startcom.org>
Jabber:         start...@startcom.org <xmpp:start...@startcom.org>
Blog:   Join the Revolution! <http://blog.startcom.org>
Phone:          +1.213.341.0390


 
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Myk Melez  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 9:16 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Myk Melez <m...@mozilla.org>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:16:22 -0800
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 9:16 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

JoeS wrote:
> Since https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385740 which was a
> great change for Firefox myk, the trunk
> for Tbird was severely impacted. If you save an action, as far as
> opening a link or calling a helper app, there
> is absolutely no way to edit that pref. Apart from saving your
> mimeTypes.rdf (or a null version of same) you are
> stuck with your decision.

Sorry, I wasn't aware of this regression.  It does sound like a problem.
  I'll follow up in the bug.

-myk


 
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JoeS  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 9:17 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: JoeS <joesab2...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:17:55 -0500
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 9:17 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.) wrote:
> JoeS wrote:
>> These things are constantly cropping up, some serious, some not.
>> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413200 has lingered now
>> for a week or so.

> Well, a bug with so much activity in one week...I wouldn't call that
> "lingering" ;-) I guess your expectations are quite high...

That's just a minor bug, but my point is that core bugs that break Tbird don't seem to get the attention that they deserve.
I'll just call that "Firefox centric" development. If we are going to get more nightly testers involved, which I think is
really necessary for the advancement of 3.0 we deserve a little respect (as does tbird itself)
The trunk has been busted for periods of several weeks in the past due to core problems. Not a good incentive for testing.

 
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David Ascher  
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 More options Jan 28 2008, 9:31 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: David Ascher <dasc...@mozilla.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:31:24 -0800
Local: Mon, Jan 28 2008 9:31 pm
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

All of which is why we're starting MailCo, recruiting full-time devs as
well as encouraging volunteer contributors, hiring a build engineer,
promoting test suite development, etc.

Joe - don't hesitate to let me know of specific bugs which need
attention, and I'll see what I can do about raising their profile.  I
know for a fact that Myk cares a lot about Thunderbird, and I'm sure
that he respects it plenty =).

--david


 
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Pascal Sartoretti  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 3:57 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Pascal Sartoretti <"pascal dot sartoretti at elca dot ch">
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:57:11 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 3:57 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

David Ascher wrote:
> * Release-defining features:
> - an integrated calendaring feature, based on Lightning
> - a better search experience, especially for message content searches
> - a better overall user experience

I would add RSS to this list of features:

1. Thunderbird has a very basic RSS support, but it is barely usable due
to numerous usability issues (if there were only a few, I would have
created issues in Bugzilla).

2. Thunderbird already wraps together an e-mail client and an NNTP
client. Although some prefer to read RSS feeds in their browser, many
others (including me) think that reading RSS feeds is an activity which
closely resembles reading NNTP newsgroups.

3. The basic infrastructure for an excellent RSS reader is already
present in Thunderbird (HTML viewer, search folders, proxy options, etc...).

4. An excellent RSS reader would also increase the user base, which is a
goal of Thunderbird 3.

Hence, I think that with a reasonable effort Thunderbird could become a
great RSS reader.

Pascal


 
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Arivald  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 4:40 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Arivald <arivald_@AT_interia_DOT_pl>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:40:13 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 4:40 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
David Ascher pisze:

My company almost decide to use Exchange. So if we want to have calendar
built-in, then maybe there should support for Exchange features.
Or at least it should be possible to make extension which provide needed
functionality.

--
Arivald


 
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Simon Paquet  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 6:09 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Simon Paquet <web...@babylonsounds.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:09:06 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 6:09 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
David Ascher wrote on 28. Jan 2008:

> * Goal: to have at public milestone build of Thunderbird 3 in 2008.  
>   Thunderbird 3's overall aim is to significantly grow its user base
>   worldwide, as well as build a strong foundation for later
>   Thunderbird releases.

> * Release-defining features:
>  - an integrated calendaring feature, based on Lightning
>  - a better search experience, especially for message content searches
>  - a better overall user experience

These sound like fine goals to me.

> * Schedule: Figuring out the schedule at this stage is hard, as it
>   will depend on who shows up with energy and talent. I would like
>   to set some placeholder milestones for discussion, however:

>  - alpha builds in Q1
>  - beta builds without calendaring starting in Q2
>  - beta builds with calendaring starting in Q3

While this sounds great in theory, it has some pretty drastic
implications for Calendar development, which one should be aware of.

| Note: I speak only for myself and from my own experience here. The
|      only person who can speak with authority about the Calendar
|      project is Daniel Boelzle, our lead developer.

Currently Calendar development happens exclusively on the 1.8 branch
to enable us to fully support TB2. All changes are cross-committed
to the trunk as well, but due to API and other architectural changes
there exist several pretty serious regressions on the trunk that we
know about.

There are probably even more regressions which we don't know about,
because we've told our testers to focus their testing on the 1.8 branch
and only a few are testing trunk builds once in a while.

I'm not a software engineer, but I would expect that it would take us
at least a month to play catchup on the trunk and fix the outstanding
regressions. This would of course mean that our planned feature
implementations for 0.9 and 1.0 would have to be postponed for said
month.

In addition it would increase the work for developers and reviewers,
who right now are not obliged to test their code on the trunk. It
would also mean that we need more manpower in the testing community,
but I'm not very concerned about that, since the inclusion into TB3
nightlies would probably result in a QA manpower increase.

> * The Mailnews/Thunderbird folks and the Calendar folks will have
>   to figure out how to best allocate dev and testing effort on the
>   calendaring features, how we support Sunbird, etc.

We'll have to think long and hard about what we'll do with Sunbird.
We'll also have to think whether we want to support SeaMonkey and how
much we want to support it, given that those guys will most likely
release alpha or beta releases of SM2 during that timeframe as well.

Simon

--
Calendar l10n coordinator
Calendar Website Maintainer: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Calendar developer blog:     http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar


 
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Pascal Sartoretti  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 8:04 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Pascal Sartoretti <"pascal dot sartoretti at elca dot ch">
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:04:02 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 8:04 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

David Ascher wrote:
> I'm certainly interested in figuring out the various "enterprise" requirements.  

Full Exchange support would be nice :-)

More seriously, I think that one single feature would greatly help the
use of Thunderbird in Exchange-based companies: the ability to *answer*
to meeting requests (currently, Thunderbird simply *displays* meeting
requests).

Pascal


 
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Simon Paquet  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 8:52 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Simon Paquet <web...@babylonsounds.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:52:53 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 8:52 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
Pascal Sartoretti wrote on 29. Jan 2008:

>> I'm certainly interested in figuring out the various "enterprise"
>> requirements.  

> Full Exchange support would be nice :-)

> More seriously, I think that one single feature would greatly help the
> use of Thunderbird in Exchange-based companies: the ability to *answer*
> to meeting requests (currently, Thunderbird simply *displays* meeting
> requests).

This is already possible if you install the Lightning extension.

Simon

--
Calendar l10n coordinator
Calendar Website Maintainer: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Calendar developer blog:     http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar


 
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Pascal Sartoretti  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 9:15 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Pascal Sartoretti <"pascal dot sartoretti at elca dot ch">
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:15:03 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 9:15 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

Simon Paquet wrote:
>> More seriously, I think that one single feature would greatly help the
>> use of Thunderbird in Exchange-based companies: the ability to
>> *answer* to meeting requests (currently, Thunderbird simply *displays*
>> meeting requests).

> This is already possible if you install the Lightning extension.

Ooops, you're right, Lightning now supports it. However, the message it
sends back to the meeting requester is a simple text message, no a
(proprietary) Exchange acknowledgment. Hence, the meeting request in the
requester's calendar will not be updated, and the requester will notice
that I am a "second class citizen" in term of Exchange integration.

Anyway, Lightning is getting better, congratulations!

Pascal


 
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Robert Kaiser  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 9:21 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Robert Kaiser <ka...@kairo.at>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:21:23 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 9:21 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

Pascal Sartoretti wrote:
> 1. Thunderbird has a very basic RSS support, but it is barely usable due
> to numerous usability issues (if there were only a few, I would have
> created issues in Bugzilla).

You should still file bugs, no matter how many or how big the issues are.

Robert Kaiser


 
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Robert Kaiser  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 9:28 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Robert Kaiser <ka...@kairo.at>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:28:07 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 9:28 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

Simon Paquet wrote:
> Currently Calendar development happens exclusively on the 1.8 branch
> to enable us to fully support TB2. All changes are cross-committed
> to the trunk as well, but due to API and other architectural changes
> there exist several pretty serious regressions on the trunk that we
> know about.

Maybe the time is arriving where that cross-commit policy needs to be
lifted (I know, that's also a question of manpower).

> We'll have to think long and hard about what we'll do with Sunbird.

True. Unfortunately the case is not as simple as with e.g. ChatZilla
here, which is able to run both as an extension and as a XULRunner app
with practically the same code - Lightning not being run in its own
window complicates things there.

> We'll also have to think whether we want to support SeaMonkey and how
> much we want to support it, given that those guys will most likely
> release alpha or beta releases of SM2 during that timeframe as well.

Yes, SeaMonkey surely will do Alphas and Betas, hopefully even a final
release of SeaMonkey 2 in that timeframe. We do not plan to ship with
Lightning in this cycle (yet), but it would be nice if we get it to run
in SeaMonkey, part of which can be achieved through making SeaMonkey
MailNews more similar to Thunderbird, but other parts might need some
patches in Lightning as well.

Robert Kaiser


 
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Robert Kaiser  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 9:32 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Robert Kaiser <ka...@kairo.at>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:32:05 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 9:32 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

David Ascher wrote:
> * Less user-visible but important goals include:

The change from wallet to toolkit's LoginManager should be added here.
Mark Banner has done some work for that, see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239131 and its dependencies.

Robert Kaiser


 
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SanderG  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 10:19 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: SanderG <fnaqre+zbmv...@tbhqfjnneq.pbz.rot13>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:19:53 -0600
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 10:19 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:53:49 -0800, David Ascher wrote:

David,

Thanks for sharing the planning. Imho it's a good starting point for
discussion.

Personally I think the points you mention are very good. There are also
some other points I hear from users around me that would help user
adoption, such as:

- Corporate users:

1. Sync the calendar with Exchange, without needing Outlook. Use OWA or a
provider to sync with the Exchange calendar;

2. Ease the install and maintainability of the software. Installing
updates is a pain, and sometimes users manage to download an update and
are unable to apply it, after which it sticks in their profile until
someone pinches it out with a needle;

- Home users:
Integration with e.g. the Windows Address Book (read and write), Gmail
IMAP (including the Google recommended changes to the Thunderbird
settings for cache and attachment fetching, saving sent messages etc.)

What I would also appreciate is more external address book functionality
- store it on Mozilla servers (Weave?), LDAP server support including
ldap-write, Google account address book or something like that, so users
with multiple accounts can sync their address book and share it with
their family.

The most important one would be Exchange calendar sync. If that cannot be
done very soon it might still be worthwhile to _mention_ it so people
know that it's on the radar.

Regards
Sander


 
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Simon Paquet  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 10:20 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Simon Paquet <web...@babylonsounds.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:20:50 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 10:20 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
Robert Kaiser wrote on 29. Jan 2008:

>> Currently Calendar development happens exclusively on the 1.8
>> branch to enable us to fully support TB2. All changes are
>> cross-committed to the trunk as well, but due to API and other
>> architectural changes there exist several pretty serious
>> regressions on the trunk that we know about.

> Maybe the time is arriving where that cross-commit policy needs
> to be lifted (I know, that's also a question of manpower).

I don't understand this. What do you mean with lift the cross-commit
policy of mozilla/calendar?

We can't just switch to the trunk. We have a few hundred thousand users
on TB2 and we can't just let them hang out in the open while TB3 is
still in alpha, beta or RC stage.

So at least until Lightning 1.0 is released (probably even longer) we
will stay on the branch or at least commit a major part of our
development resources there.

Simon

--
Calendar l10n coordinator
Calendar Website Maintainer: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Calendar developer blog:     http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar


 
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Pascal Sartoretti  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 10:21 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Pascal Sartoretti <"pascal dot sartoretti at elca dot ch">
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:21:32 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 10:21 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning

Robert Kaiser wrote:
> You should still file bugs, no matter how many or how big the issues are.

Here is what I think about RSS support in Thunderbird: the whole
configuration UI is a mess, I am confused between what is a feed, a
subscription, a location and a folder (from a user point of view, they
are pretty much all the same...).

I don't know how to express this in a constructive way in Bugzilla :-)

On the other hand, the UI for reading RSS is ok.

Just a question to Thunderbird users: who also uses it for RSS?

Pascal


 
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Simon Paquet  
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 More options Jan 29 2008, 10:30 am
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird
From: Simon Paquet <web...@babylonsounds.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:30:50 +0100
Local: Tues, Jan 29 2008 10:30 am
Subject: Re: Thunderbird 3 Planning
SanderG wrote on 29. Jan 2008:

> Thanks for sharing the planning. Imho it's a good starting point for
> discussion.

> Personally I think the points you mention are very good. There are
> also some other points I hear from users around me that would help
> user adoption, such as:

> - Corporate users:

> 1. Sync the calendar with Exchange, without needing Outlook. Use OWA
>    or a provider to sync with the Exchange calendar;

Exchange support would be great to have of course, but it is
absolutely impossible to achieve this in the TB3 timeframe that David
proposed.

In addition the only viable open source solution that could be used
to quickly add Exchange support to Thunderbird and Lightning (libmapi)
can not be used because of license imcompatibilities (libmapi uses
GPLv3, while we use the MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license).

Unless the libmapi developers change their license, we would have to
implement this stuff from scratch, which would probably take at least
1-2 years to reach a "basic support"-milestone.

Simon

--
Calendar l10n coordinator
Calendar Website Maintainer: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Calendar developer blog:     http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar


 
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