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.

> 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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