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David Ascher  
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(7 users)  More options Jan 28, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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.