Request for Survey Response from Thunderbird Developers

[den...@iiitd.ac.in]

Dear Thunderbird Developers,

I am a graduate student at IIIT-Delhi, India [0]. My research interests lie in the area of software engineering data mining. In particular, I look to mine software repositories (like Thunderbird Issue Tracking System hosted on Bugzilla) to understand and improve productivity of software maintenance professionals.

Currently, we are looking into understanding link (web URL) sharing patterns in the Thunderbird Issue Tracking System. It would be of great help if the Thunderbird-Developer community would help us in improving our knowledge and understanding by answering a 5-minute survey.

The survey consists of just 7 questions - 6 multiple choice mandatory questions plus 1 free form optional text question. It would be great to receive comments from the developer community.

Following is a link to my survey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/link-sharing-thunderbird


[0] http://iiitd.ac.in/

[Robert Miles]

Sorry, I tried to become a Thunderbird developer, but had to put that
idea aside when I saw the list of computer programming languages used
(it includes 3 I have never used).

Are you sure you don't mean Firefox instead of Thunderbird, since
Firefox makes much more use of URLs?

[Jens Müller]

Am 01.05.2013 05:53, schrieb Robert Miles:
> Are you sure you don't mean Firefox instead of Thunderbird, since
> Firefox makes much more use of URLs?

Firefox-related bugs include more URLs? Is that so? Would be interesting
to understand why ...

[Joshua Cranmer 🐧]

Of all open bugs, 5.9% of those in the Thunderbird product and 9.9% of
those in the Mailnews Core product have URLs. For Firefox, 12% of those
in the Firefox product and 20% of those in the Core product have URLs.

In my experience, URLs in bugzilla tend to be used to refer to one of
two main categories:
1. Here is a website explaining/demonstrating the issue.
2. Here is the specification to be implemented.

For a bug related to layout issues, I wouldn't be surprised if the URL
field contained a link to an incorrectly laid-out page instead of a
Bugzilla attachment. Thunderbird's bugs would be bad mail rendering,
which are more likely to be uploaded or privately emailed than linked to
from a URL. In addition, there is a large diversity of bugs in the
Firefox codebase which can be summed up as either "we do badly on
<insert new performance testsuite of the day>" or "please implement this
<insert random prototyped stuff>", both of which would be likely to
collect URLs. For Thunderbird, there really doesn't exist any
performance or conformance testsuites to care about, and new additions
to our underlying protocols come only very slowly--there's only 20 RFCs
in the Lemonade suite of IMAP updates in the past 5 years, which is the
largest set of useful new specifications to Thunderbird.

--
Joshua Cranmer
Thunderbird and DXR developer
Source code archæologist