2003-07-14 - Summary of mozilla.org staff meeting
Gervase Markham
-------------------------------------------------
Present: asa, gerv, dawn, dmose, blizzard, brendan, myk, scc, seth,
mitchell (at end)
*1.5 alpha*
- As soon as Asa has tested builds - RSN
*Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1*
- Working to align Mozilla Firebird releases with Mozilla releases. Asa
talking with Ben and others.
- Come from the trunk at the 1.5alpha branch point, so without the big
work
- Need to start selling it as a technology preview
- It'll take a year to get something shippable to end users (brendan)
- Depends on hyatt's and ben's time
*Mozilla Foundation*
- We are Going public RSN
- Non-profit, 501c3 incorp. in Calif., Mozilla Foundation
- We get:
- mozilla.org, com, biz, info.
- licenses
- NPLed code will be licensed to the Foundation under the MPL
- Data (Bugzilla, CVS, etc.)
- Other IP
- Machines
- Tinderbox machines
- Brian Behlendorf (Apache) will be on the original board
- We need a donate button
- New front page for Tuesday (end user focus, lighter look; Ben G, Asa
and Brendan did that)
- It will be sent out today for review
- Mitch K is chairman of the board, Mitchell is President, Brendan is
Secretary.
- Brendan is drafting a newsgroup post to go out before the wire
services get the press release
Brant Langer Gurganus
> - It'll take a year to get something shippable to end users (brendan)
Is there currently any progress to port help to Firebird/Thunderbird?
There are Help buttons that do nothing right now. If there is no
progress already, I'd like to take a stab at it.
> - We get:
> - mozilla.org, com, biz, info.
> - licenses
> - NPLed code will be licensed to the Foundation under the MPL
> - Data (Bugzilla, CVS, etc.)
> - Other IP
> - Machines
> - Tinderbox machines
Is the Talkback client and servers included or is a new one needed?
> - We need a donate button
It might be good to explain what donations go to.
--
Brant Langer Gurganus
QA Volunteer
Michael Lefevre
> Gervase Markham wrote:
>
>> - We need a donate button
>
> It might be good to explain what donations go to.
The Mozilla Foundation, of course ;)
But yeah, they should have an explanation of the organisation, what the
money will go towards, and other payment methods - some means of credit
card payment without Paypal, and cheques 'checks', some real world address
etc. I imagine all that will appear in time, although hopefully it won't
take years...
--
Michael
Gervase Markham
"Currently under negotiation", was the last I heard - I believe it's
supposed to be included.
>> - We need a donate button
>
> It might be good to explain what donations go to.
The Mozilla Foundation - which is employing people to co-ordinate,
maintain and hack on mozilla.org projects. So it will go to pay for
salaries, hosting, bandwidth, office space etc.
Gerv
Peter Lairo
>>
>> It might be good to explain what donations go to.
>
> The Mozilla Foundation - which is employing people to co-ordinate,
> maintain and hack on mozilla.org projects. So it will go to pay for
> salaries, hosting, bandwidth, office space etc.
So mozilla could actually have some paid programmers that could fix bugs
that are important but that nobody has (wanted to) fix yet? If so, I
would like to nominate these bugs for priority fixing:
The "Start my reply above the quoted text" setting should ALSO allow to
prepend the signature above the quote text. (top)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429#c74
Move quote reply pref (reply below/above) to account settings
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141531#c5
--
Peter Lairo
Newsgroup for end-user discussion and peer support:
snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/netscape.mozilla.user.general
Mozilla Guide: http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/guide/
Henrik Lynggaard
Gervase Markham wrote:
> *Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1*
> - It'll take a year to get something shippable to end users (brendan)
> - Depends on hyatt's and ben's time
Could we please get some elaboration on this one. I fail to see why it
should take a whole year.
Could someone please pin-point the areas that need work, and what the
requirements must be met for a 1.0 release ?
Michael Lefevre
>
> Gervase Markham wrote:
>
>> *Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1*
>
>> - It'll take a year to get something shippable to end users (brendan)
>> - Depends on hyatt's and ben's time
>
> Could we please get some elaboration on this one. I fail to see why it
> should take a whole year.
I guess the name indicates that that was Brendan's guesstimate, and I'd
guess the fact it's attributed probably indicates that it wasn't an
agreement of everyone at the meeting. As it says, it depends on hyatt's
and ben's time - unless a whole bunch of experienced developers turn up
from nowhere to work on the project, development is going to be slower
than it has been.
I assume "shippable to end users" means something like Mozilla 1.0
quality. Firebird is more advanced, but still needs work, to have a
shippable bundle of apps, Thunderbird and the other bits must also reach
that point.
> Could someone please pin-point the areas that need work, and what the
> requirements must be met for a 1.0 release ?
Doing that pin-pointing is probably one of the areas that needs work ;)
The roadmap page has some generalities.
My 2p... I realise you probably wanted elaboration from Brendan or a
Mozilla person rather than someone else speculating...
--
Michael
qwerty
Because it's not as small as possible
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171082
No offline help
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165960
Art issues
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170677
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212779
A list of blockers that always gets bigger
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&product=Firebird&target_milestone=After+Firebird+1.0&target_milestone=Firebird0.7&target_milestone=Firebird0.8&target_milestone=Firebird0.9&target_milestone=Firebird1.0&long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=exact&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailqa_contact2=1&emailtype2=exact&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&changedin=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=
Transferring seamonkey/firebird over
Less paid people
Brian Heinrich
> On 7/22/03 2:20 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> >>
> >> It might be good to explain what donations go to.
> > > The Mozilla Foundation - which is employing people to
> > > co-ordinate, > maintain and hack on mozilla.org projects. So it
> > > will go to pay for > salaries, hosting, bandwidth, office space
> > > etc.
>
> So mozilla could actually have some paid programmers that could fix
> bugs that are important but that nobody has (wanted to) fix yet? If
> so, I would like to nominate these bugs for priority fixing:
>
> The "Start my reply above the quoted text" setting should ALSO allow
> to prepend the signature above the quote text. (top)
> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429#c74
>
> Move quote reply pref (reply below/above) to account settings
> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141531#c5
Of /course/ you would, Peter. :-(
Would somebody just mark
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429> invalid? Please?
The whole idea needs to be rethought; unfortunately, Peter and a few
others are so stuck on replicating the broken behaviour of Outlook, &c,
that they can't see that what they're asking for /in the form for which
they're asking/ is likely to be an utter mess. :-( There are
alternative solutions that would not involve breaking \n-- \n.
The idea behind <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141531> on
one that I suspect few people would complain of. Would cut down on
people top-posting 'cos they can't figure out how to bottom-post. ;-)
/b.
Matthias Versen
> Is the Talkback client and servers included or is a new one needed?
The problem :
Who can now access the Stack traces ?
It was always difficult to get the stacks but this is now impossible.
And stack traces helps a lot if you try to triage bugs...
I stopped requesting TB IDs from the reporter because it doesn't help if
you can't get the stack from the ID...
Matthias
--
Please delete everything between "matti" and the "@" in my mail address.
Brendan Eich
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=72090&cid=6508552
We're working on a new schedule. Not sure when it will be published --
"soon".
/be
Rainer Kugeland
> We're working on a new schedule. Not sure when it will be published --
> "soon".
Don't get me wrong but when I look at history then we all know that it
took too long to come from Netscape 4.x to Mozilla 1.0.
I guess when it'll take a year to bring out a new Mozilla version then
nobody is interested in it anymore because even KHTML catches up already.
So Brendan, as I mentioned some days before, it would be a good idea
just to tell us what is planned for the next months. Will there be a
Seamonkey based 1.6 comming out this year or what else?
I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone needs
to modify his code for every browser. And as soon as the community gets
the impression that the mozilla project will significantly slow down and
the next version will come out summer 2004 then I'm afraid that the
support for mozilla will also slow down.
I really hope that I'm wrong...
RK
Simon Paquet
I'm not Brendan, I'm just doing a lot of QA work on Firebird and the
area that needs work is definitely QA. A lot of bug reports are of
very bad quality, are filed with months-old builds, are not tested
against seamonkey, etc.
Some help in testing and triaging would definitely be appreciated.
--
Simon Paquet
http://sipaq.blogspot.com - Simon's Mozilla Blog
Boris Zbarsky
> I guess when it'll take a year to bring out a new Mozilla version
> then nobody is interested in it anymore because even KHTML catches up
> already.
KHTML is a rendering engine. We're talking about the Mozilla UI. The
two have absolutely nothing in common.
Work on Mozilla's rendering engine is going on reasonably nicely and
independently of whether the browser front-end wrapped around it is
Firebird or SeaMonkey.
> I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
> because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone
> needs to modify his code for every browser.
So what you really care about is the rendering engine, then.
> And as soon as the community gets the impression that the mozilla
> project will significantly slow down and the next version will come
> out summer 2004
The "next version" of the rendering engine will be coming out in 1.5, a
good deal before summer 2004. Regardless of the UI that 1.5 has.
But yes, there may well be a perception that work on the rendering
engine will slow down... it's hard to combat that by any means other
than pointing out how many of the people doing said work were not
working at Netscape or have been hired by IBM and others to continue the
work they were doing at Netscape....
-Boris
Rainer Kugland
I still don't understand what parts of a browser are causing a delay of
a new version. But currently there's a lot of confusion out there. I had
to stop all development on mozilla apps because nobody can tell which
parts will still run on firewird and which won't.
So, regardless whether a new UI, the rendering engine or whatever is
causing a delay, the bottomline is that people outside like me, need to
know what will show up next.
To give you a concrete example: In winter I was working on some web
pages which should use rich text editing etc. Then came the new roadmap
and everything stopped. Until now, I have no idea, if I have to stop the
project or not because the features I need are implemented in IE and
Mozilla 1.4 but they aren't standard W3C definitions, so that opera and
friends won't work. But how do I know that it makes sense to continue
when firebird once will come up without any Midas things etc.
I know that from your point of view it sounds that I'm talking about
totally different things, ie. one thing is gecko, the other is the new
XUL firebird etc.
But at the end of the day, the people out there don't care about this
strict differences. The only interesting thing is: what product will
show up when and what can I do with it?
So,please don't treat this comment as unqualified critics but more as
the frustrated call for help...
RK
Brendan Eich
> Brendan Eich wrote:
>
>> We're working on a new schedule. Not sure when it will be published
>> -- "soon".
>
>
> Don't get me wrong but when I look at history then we all know that it
> took too long to come from Netscape 4.x to Mozilla 1.0.
An almost complete rewrite of multiple millions of lines of code took
place during that transition. It is beyond me how you can compare that
effort to polishing the XUL UI of Firebird, and completing and polishing
Thunderbird's front end. The polishing and front end work entail
changing thousands, not rewriting millions, of lines of code.
> I guess when it'll take a year to bring out a new Mozilla version then
> nobody is interested in it anymore because even KHTML catches up already.
Another bogus assertion. Have you tested KHTML against the top 1000 or
top 10,000 websites visited by a large population of users? Have you
tried the top 100,000 sites for a Netscape-sized (20 million downloads)
audience? Let's talk about KHTML vs. Gecko when you have. Oh, and you
must care only about Linux. And please don't drag Safari into this
until all the major Apple changes have been reincorporated into KHTML.
> So Brendan, as I mentioned some days before, it would be a good idea
> just to tell us what is planned for the next months. Will there be a
> Seamonkey based 1.6 comming out this year or what else?
Please re-read the updated roadmap.
> I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
> because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone needs
> to modify his code for every browser.
Not true.
And as soon as the community gets
> the impression that the mozilla project will significantly slow down and
> the next version will come out summer 2004 then I'm afraid that the
> support for mozilla will also slow down.
In the real world, support for Mozilla has little to do with Mozilla
"slowing down". First, we release quarterly milestones, which are held
to the same or better stability standards. Second, Gecko support by web
content authors is based on user-agent hits on servers hosting the web
content, and also on user complaints to webmasters that are numerous
enough to be heard. Safari using "(like Gecko)" in its user agent
string shows how Gecko has already influenced top sites to use more
standard content.
Therefore, distribution is the key to unlocking standard-conformant web
content. The Mozilla Foundation is working hard on distribution,
especially of our stable release (1.4). We will make a big mistake if
we rush out the next generation of applications, with diminished quality
due to the rushing.
But again (see my followup in this newsgroup), the meeting minutes did
not "quote" me accurately and in context. Now that we have set up the
Mozilla Foundation and are hiring key people, no one I know thinks it
will take a year to reach Firebird 1.0. But we are not going to make a
wild guess and say six months, or four months, either. See the Mozilla
1.0 manifesto (http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/mozilla-1.0.html) for the
plan we stuck with to get to 1.0. We'll have a plan similar to that,
with a schedule likely to be shorter, to get to Firebird 1.0. Soon.
> I really hope that I'm wrong...
I don't think you are analyzing the problems at hand correctly.
/be
L. David Baron
> To give you a concrete example: In winter I was working on some web
> pages which should use rich text editing etc. Then came the new roadmap
> and everything stopped. Until now, I have no idea, if I have to stop the
> project or not because the features I need are implemented in IE and
> Mozilla 1.4 but they aren't standard W3C definitions, so that opera and
> friends won't work. But how do I know that it makes sense to continue
> when firebird once will come up without any Midas things etc.
Firebird not including Midas is a bug, and should be fixed. It's the
result of somewhat overzealous disabling of parts of Gecko that they
thought they didn't need.
I think we need to label any build options that modify what standards or
extensions are supported in web content (e.g.,
--enable-plaintext-editor-only, --disable-xul, etc.) as options that
should only be used on small devices that can't possibly have room for
the code being disabled. I don't think people who are shipping browsers
for desktop machines should be changing these options.
If distributors of Gecko-based browsers continue to fiddle with what we
support in web content, we will fail to present a consistent API to web
developers and make it harder for web developers to support Gecko-based
browsers. This will reduce the percentage of the web that works with
Gecko-based browsers and make it even harder for us to keep up with the
web.
-David
--
L. David Baron <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
Gervase Markham
> But again (see my followup in this newsgroup), the meeting minutes did
> not "quote" me accurately and in context.
Yes - as minute-taker, apologies for that.
Gerv
Rainer Kugland
>> I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
>> because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone needs
>> to modify his code for every browser.
>
> Not true.
It's true. Try to access the DOM with IE, Opera and Mozilla. Now you can
say that IE doesn't comply to the W3C but is anyone of the 90% users
interested in this fact?
> I don't think you are analyzing the problems at hand correctly.
Maybe you're right but I'm afraid that also 90% of the users also don't
because the mozilla project and project goals at all became hard to
understand. Now you can say that everyone should read here and there
more carefully or you should consider to strip not only the mozilla code
but also the information which goes out to the world.
I don't want to offend you and maybe it's too easy to give some critits
being not involved in the whole thing but I just wanted to say how
information might be understood from the endusers point of view.
Best
RK
Michael Lefevre
> Rainer Kugeland wrote:
>
>> So Brendan, as I mentioned some days before, it would be a good idea
>> just to tell us what is planned for the next months. Will there be a
>> Seamonkey based 1.6 comming out this year or what else?
>
> Please re-read the updated roadmap.
The update to the roadmap consisted of adding another rather vague
statement about implementing the new architecture over the next several
milestones. The rest of the document still reads as a proposal for a new
architecture, it isn't much of a plan for how it's actually going to
happen.
My current understanding is that the trunk will carry on with quarterly
milestones based on Seamonkey, while progress is made on Firebird,
Thunderbird, etc. Then when it's decided those apps are good enough and
have all the bits needed for integration, work will begin on moving them
in as the primary apps. Given the time scales, I think the answer to
"will 1.6 be Seamonkey-based" is likely to be yes.
[snip]
>> I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
>> because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone needs
>> to modify his code for every browser.
>
> Not true.
Either I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, or you're misunderstanding
what he's saying? If it's true that you don't need to code for specific
browsers, why does the brand new Mozilla.org page contain an @import of a
CSS file called "nav4Hack.css"?
[snip]
> will take a year to reach Firebird 1.0. But we are not going to make a
> wild guess and say six months, or four months, either. See the Mozilla
> 1.0 manifesto (http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/mozilla-1.0.html) for the
> plan we stuck with to get to 1.0. We'll have a plan similar to that,
> with a schedule likely to be shorter, to get to Firebird 1.0. Soon.
So there's going to be a Mozilla roadmap which will move along with 1.6,
1.7, etc, and a separate Firebird roadmap leading up to 1.0. Presumably
we will also need to have roadmaps for Thunderbird, Composer, etc? And
then at some point when things are ready, there can be a meta-roadmap so
people will actually be able to see what the longer term plan is...
The problem with this approach is that Firebird and Thunderbird
development seems to be progressing with pretty much no consideration of
the fact that they are ultimately going to be bundled together somehow.
Ifdefs going into to make separate GREs for each of them, diverging
designs for preferences, and extensions being developed randomly for
either or both separately. Surely if that happens for another 6 months,
bringing things together is going to be more work than if each was
developed as of now with a view to making the combining happen?
--
Michael
Brendan Eich
> Brendan Eich wrote:
>
>>> I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
>>> because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone
>>> needs to modify his code for every browser.
>>
>> Not true.
>
> It's true.
It's true that no two browsers are 100% compatible, nor will they *ever*
be. But my "Not true" applied to your claim that a lot of people need
this information inorder to modify his code for every browser. That is
not true now.
Authors either write IE-only pages, or they use user-agent forks to
detect IE vs. standard vs. old-Netscape (possibly they detect other
browsers and versions). But anyone writing web content does not have to
get all the information available on all browsers, including *future*
versions of Mozilla.
First, you mixed layout engine futures with application futures, as bz
pointed out.
Second, the vast majority of pages that detect Gecko then proceed to use
the w3c standards for Gecko browsers. These pages will work a year from
now in Mozilla Firebird as well as, or better than, they do today in 1.4
or Firebird 0.6.
Try to access the DOM with IE, Opera and Mozilla. Now you can
> say that IE doesn't comply to the W3C but is anyone of the 90% users
> interested in this fact?
What does this have to do with your claim that "a lot of people" need
information on when Mozilla Firebird will reach 1.0?
>> I don't think you are analyzing the problems at hand correctly.
>
> Maybe you're right but I'm afraid that also 90% of the users also don't
> because the mozilla project and project goals at all became hard to
> understand. Now you can say that everyone should read here and there
> more carefully or you should consider to strip not only the mozilla code
> but also the information which goes out to the world.
The only thing that's hard to understand, it seems, it that we can't and
won't claim to predict the future, needlessly and hopelessly, I should add.
> I don't want to offend you and maybe it's too easy to give some critits
> being not involved in the whole thing but I just wanted to say how
> information might be understood from the endusers point of view.
You're right that the roadmap needs another update. It'll take a little
while to get a schedule worked out in light of the good news of the
Mozilla Foundation. I hope you can be patient while we work out the
details.
/be
Michael Lefevre
> Rainer Kugland wrote:
>
>> Brendan Eich wrote:
>>
>>>> I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
>>>> because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone
>>>> needs to modify his code for every browser.
>>>
>>> Not true.
>>
>> It's true.
>
> It's true that no two browsers are 100% compatible, nor will they *ever*
> be. But my "Not true" applied to your claim that a lot of people need
> this information inorder to modify his code for every browser. That is
> not true now.
To some extent... Firebird doesn't have any control of security
certificates, and it doesn't have Midas. That kind of thing is relevant
to some types of site developers.
[snip]
> The only thing that's hard to understand, it seems, it that we can't and
> won't claim to predict the future, needlessly and hopelessly, I should add.
who is "we". Various Mozilla people have made various predictions in
various places (meeting minutes, misquotes included; blog comments; the
branding document; the old Firebird roadmap - that's still up and still
says Firebird 0.7 will be in July). All that stuff has already been
picked up, and some of it has made it onto cnet, slashdot, etc.
> You're right that the roadmap needs another update. It'll take a little
> while to get a schedule worked out in light of the good news of the
> Mozilla Foundation. I hope you can be patient while we work out the
> details.
I think it's pretty obvious that people can't be patient. People have
been asking detailed questions about this stuff for 3 or 4 months - when
Mozilla doesn't answer the questions, people find and/or make up their own
answers, which may or may not be the right ones.
Another example that's just being argued in the mozillazine forums -
Firebird and Thunderbird are both up on download.com, and Firebird is
getting some pretty bad ratings. Blake seems to be upset by this and is
asking people to go there and give it positive ratings.
If Firebird and Thunderbird are ready to be distributed to the world on
download.com, and heavily advertised on the Mozilla.org front page with a
kind of "switch" campaign, then you shouldn't still be asking people to be
patient and wait for a roadmap...
--
Michael
Boris Zbarsky
> It's true. Try to access the DOM with IE, Opera and Mozilla. Now you can
> say that IE doesn't comply to the W3C but is anyone of the 90% users
> interested in this fact?
I can't speak for Opera, but what IE implements, as far as core and HTML
DOM goes (I'm not including things like ranges, etc) is actually
pretty close to what Mozilla implements.
Now IE also implements extensions of its own, and page authors tend to
use those for IE and W3 DOM code for Mozilla, but that's the fault of
page authors who don't bother to realize that the W3 DOM code works for
both browsers.
-Boris
David Tenser
>
> Therefore, distribution is the key to unlocking standard-conformant web
> content. The Mozilla Foundation is working hard on distribution,
> especially of our stable release (1.4). We will make a big mistake if
> we rush out the next generation of applications, with diminished quality
> due to the rushing.
>
Exactly right! What we're doing is good, I fully support the new roadmap.
/ David
Boris Zbarsky
> Firebird [...] doesn't have Midas.
Sure it does, if you get a current Firebird build.
> Another example that's just being argued in the mozillazine forums -
> Firebird and Thunderbird are both up on download.com
Which is something we don't have much control over, do we? If people
want to post pre-alpha software on download.com and then complain about
it, what's to stop them?
> Blake seems to be upset by this and is
> asking people to go there and give it positive ratings.
This is clearly more productive than addressing the issues the negative
comments raise (granted, most of those comments are content-less, but a
few raise interesting points....)
> and heavily advertised on the Mozilla.org front page with a
> kind of "switch" campaign
The first link under "Products" is to Mozilla 1.4. The only browser
listed under "Download" is Mozilla 1.4. If we exclude the links to
nightly builds, Firebird is listed below Mozilla 1.5a under "Technology
Previews" and, in smallish font, in the central "mozilla.org products"
section. You have to hit PgDown to even get to a mention of Firebird.
Thunderbird is only mentioned in the "products" section, and gets even
less space there than Firebird.
This is "heavily advertised"? Are we looking at the same web page here?
-Boris
Michael Lefevre
> Michael Lefevre wrote:
[snip]
>> and heavily advertised on the Mozilla.org front page with a
>> kind of "switch" campaign
>
> The first link under "Products" is to Mozilla 1.4. The only browser
> listed under "Download" is Mozilla 1.4. If we exclude the links to
> nightly builds, Firebird is listed below Mozilla 1.5a under "Technology
> Previews" and, in smallish font, in the central "mozilla.org products"
> section. You have to hit PgDown to even get to a mention of Firebird.
> This is "heavily advertised"? Are we looking at the same web page here?
well it's more heavily advertised than Netscape is on Netscape.com :)
"A Lean, Mean Browsing Machine.", and the link in the "Find out why people
everywhere are switching to Firebird." to
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/why/ does not make it clear that
it is, as you say, pre-alpha software. It sounds like it's a product to
be downloaded. And http://www.blakeross.com/firebird/marketing.html
definitely looks like it's talking about marketing...
What's going on with the Firebird name anyway - it has a nice new icon to
go with the "Firebird" name. How does this fit in with "Mozilla Firebird"
being a transitory name, not to be used without the pre-pended Mozilla...
has the previous branding policy been dumped, or is Mozilla.org just
breaking it's own policy?
--
Michael
Boris Zbarsky
> does not make it clear that it is, as you say, pre-alpha software.
I never said Firebird is pre-alpha. Please read what I wrote again, and
do not conflate the sections that apply to Thunderbird with those that
apply to Firebird.
> And http://www.blakeross.com/firebird/marketing.html
> definitely looks like it's talking about marketing...
Mozilla.org is not exactly in a position to change that page if it
wanted to, now is it? It's someone's personal page.
-Boris
Michael Lefevre
[snip]
> Mozilla.org is not exactly in a position to change that page if it
> wanted to, now is it? It's someone's personal page.
True. Please ignore previous misdirected rants. The problem is the lack
of direction or communication from Mozilla.org, which given that they've
only existed for a couple of weeks is understandable...
--
Michael
Christopher Blizzard
--Chris
-- ------------ Christopher Blizzard http://www.mozilla.org ------------
Michael Lefevre
> This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
> --------------080301040207090604010208
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> Michael Lefevre wrote:
>>
>>True. Please ignore previous misdirected rants. The problem is the lack
>>of direction or communication from Mozilla.org, which given that they've
>>only existed for a couple of weeks is understandable...
>
> What kind of communication were you looking for, exactly?
I think the issues are pretty well known...
Biggest thing is the roadmap. The current Mozilla roadmap, with the
exception of a couple of sentences, still reads as a proposal for a
possible future direction, and maps out dates for just the next 5 weeks.
Firebird and Thunderbird have their own roadmaps which don't seem to take
much account of the "to do" list in the Mozilla roadmap for getting the
apps into a state where they can be shipped to end-users as a bundle. I
understand that people don't want to be drawn on whether it will take 4
months, 6 months or a year, but some clue about how the process is going
to be managed would be good.
Seeing things like all bugs in Firebird on Mac OS X (which is miles behind
Firebird on Windows/Linux as it is) getting reassigned to nobody@, and
people blogging about nasty #ifdefs being added to Thunderbird doesn't
inspire confidence.
Related to my ranting further up the thread, the branding policy (which
has your name on it), states that the Firebird name is going to be dropped
after 1.4. It clearly needs updating in that respect, but what is going
to be the replacement, do we assume that the "Firebird" name will stick
around for the next period before it gets onto the trunk. And if it's
going to be sold as a technology preview with that name for 6 months, what
chance is there of dropping the name later?
Other things that have come up in recent threads/blogs...
MNG/JNG - staff/drivers have said nothing about this. From a couple of
things Gerv has said, one might understand that it's being held up waiting
for an answer from a certain person. If the certain person doesn't bother
to give an answer, is the question, which has been being argued for a
couple of months already, going to remain open for argument forever?
Website - someone posted some questions about the website in the .general
group. Who is running the Mozilla.org website? Where should ideas about
it be discussed? What's the development / checkin model for the website?
How can people help improve the website?
Bugzilla is swamped with far more (mostly useless) reports than could be
dealt with when there were more developers, let alone now. As a result,
most bug reports are ignored, and most checkins are the result of
developers doing their own QA, filing their own bugs and fixing them,
which is not the idea. Is there any plan for improving that situation, or
is it going to continue to be a case of expecting an army of QA volunteers
to turn up and look through thousands of crappy old bug reports (hasn't
happened yet, isn't likely to, IMHO)?
News about release candidates and details of release scheduling tend to
come via Asa's blog. The discussion of the code reorganisation comes from
Seawood's blog (where he mentions that Leaf said that drivers said it
wasn't worth the effort). We have the Mozilla meeting minutes (2 or 3
weeks after the event), but those also tend to be vague (if not
misquoted).
It's better than nothing, but it shouldn't be necessary to
hunt around in blogs and meeting minutes and infer things - that kind of
stuff should come directly from staff/drivers.
The one official "news"
channel - http://www.mozilla.org/news.html has been removed from the front
page, and lacks any news about the creation of the foundation, Thunderbird
0.1 or Firebird 0.6.1. If it's not going to be updated any more, it
should be removed. Same applies to the old Firebird roadmap which is
still available at
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/firebird-roadmap.html and the
even older Firebird roadmap at
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-roadmap.html
And, as a final throwaway, what's happening with talkback?
--
Michael
John Smith
> I'm not Brendan, I'm just doing a lot of QA work on Firebird and the
> area that needs work is definitely QA. A lot of bug reports are of
> very bad quality, are filed with months-old builds, are not tested
> against seamonkey, etc.
>
> Some help in testing and triaging would definitely be appreciated.
>
Seamonkey QA is worse with 2 year old bugs and QA contacts that do nothing
Brendan Eich
> In article <3F201007...@meer.net>, Brendan Eich wrote:
>
>>Rainer Kugeland wrote:
>>
>>
>>>So Brendan, as I mentioned some days before, it would be a good idea
>>>just to tell us what is planned for the next months. Will there be a
>>>Seamonkey based 1.6 comming out this year or what else?
>>
>>Please re-read the updated roadmap.
>
>
> The update to the roadmap consisted of adding another rather vague
> statement about implementing the new architecture over the next several
> milestones. The rest of the document still reads as a proposal for a new
> architecture, it isn't much of a plan for how it's actually going to
> happen.
So? That wasn't the question Rainer asked, and it wasn't the answer I
gave in pointing to the update that you allow (the uncalled-for "rather
vague" notwithstanding) *does* say that the next several milestones will
see SeaMonkey being built alongside the new apps.
If you want a detailed plan of how we'll build the new apps to the
appropriate 1.0-like level of quality, I've already said we are working
on that with the developers, and we'll update the roadmap when we have a
schedule everyone agrees to.
I get the feeling you're frustrated that we haven't finished that
planning exercise already. That's understandable, but please don't
misread what Rainer and I wrote above on account of frustration.
> My current understanding is that the trunk will carry on with quarterly
> milestones based on Seamonkey, while progress is made on Firebird,
> Thunderbird, etc. Then when it's decided those apps are good enough and
> have all the bits needed for integration, work will begin on moving them
> in as the primary apps. Given the time scales, I think the answer to
> "will 1.6 be Seamonkey-based" is likely to be yes.
The roadmap clearly said that in the updated part:
"It's clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird
by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone. Instead, we expect Mozilla 1.5 to
coincide with Mozilla Firebird 0.7."
Mozilla 1.5 is a release just like 1.4, 1.3.1, etc. back to the pre-1.0
days -- a release of the SeaMonkey app suite. Coinciding with it, using
the same rev of common back end code (not necessarily sharing the code
via a single GRE), will be Mozilla Firebird 0.7.
>>>I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
>>>because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone needs
>>>to modify his code for every browser.
>>
>>Not true.
>
>
> Either I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, or you're misunderstanding
> what he's saying? If it's true that you don't need to code for specific
> browsers, why does the brand new Mozilla.org page contain an @import of a
> CSS file called "nav4Hack.css"?
You are not reading what I wrote after the "Not true." that you
selectively quoted. The bone of contention (please reread what Rainer
wrote, and what I wrote -- and read all of it) was *future* release
dates, not past versions of Netscape that have well-known standards
conformance problems.
You don't need to know *future* release dates to write web content that
will work in Gecko based apps. Of course you may need hacks for Nav4,
if you care to target that. You may need to work around IE bugs. But
stick to the subject: Rainer's apparent desire to know future release
dates of Mozilla apps in order to write standard content.
> So there's going to be a Mozilla roadmap which will move along with 1.6,
> 1.7, etc, and a separate Firebird roadmap leading up to 1.0. Presumably
> we will also need to have roadmaps for Thunderbird, Composer, etc? And
> then at some point when things are ready, there can be a meta-roadmap so
> people will actually be able to see what the longer term plan is...
There will be one consolidated roadmap, as always. Development on this
scale doesn't happen top-down, however, so of course there will be
roadmaps for apps, modules, and other subsystems. Drivers and staff
work to harmonize and keep coherent all these efforts by many people.
> The problem with this approach is that Firebird and Thunderbird
> development seems to be progressing with pretty much no consideration of
> the fact that they are ultimately going to be bundled together somehow.
That has been true too much so far, yes. It's often better to build
bottom up, then figure out the big picture. Recall that Mozilla
Firebird began as mozilla/browser when there was no Thunderbird in
sight. If you think large system design should be done in one pass,
from the top down, then you and I have a big disagreement.
> Ifdefs going into to make separate GREs for each of them,
Those are bugs to fix. I and other drivers will make sure they get
fixed. Saying they're bad is not the same as saying they never should
have gone in for expediency's sake. I'm not going to judge them _en masse_.
diverging
> designs for preferences,
Why should preferences be the same between different apps? IE and OE
don't have the same prefs; neither do Epiphany and Evolution.
and extensions being developed randomly for
> either or both separately.
What is wrong with separate addons for separate apps? You seem to want
central planning and master control.
You are mixing several different complaints here for effect, not out of
frustration. It seems to me you want the integrated SeaMonkey app
suite, not separate applications.
Surely if that happens for another 6 months,
> bringing things together is going to be more work than if each was
> developed as of now with a view to making the combining happen?
The goal is not to "bring things together" so that the result looks
exactly like today's integrated app suite. That never was the goal.
If you prefer the app suite because it is integrated, has consolidated
prefs, and random (but all or nothing, not per app) addons, then you'll
probably always prefer the app suite.
/be
Brendan Eich
> The one official "news"
> channel - http://www.mozilla.org/news.html has been removed from the front
> page, and lacks any news about the creation of the foundation, Thunderbird
> 0.1 or Firebird 0.6.1. If it's not going to be updated any more, it
> should be removed.
News items on the front page are updated automatically, per the old
convention of magic comments in news.html. Thanks to dba...@dbaron.org
for the perl changes.
/be
Brendan Eich
> In article <3F214EBE...@meer.net>, Brendan Eich wrote:
>
>>Rainer Kugland wrote:
>>
>>>Brendan Eich wrote:
>>>
>>>>>I know there are a lot of people out there who need this information
>>>>>because as long as all browsers aren't 100% compatible, everyone
>>>>>needs to modify his code for every browser.
>>>>
>>>>Not true.
>>>
>>>It's true.
>>
>>It's true that no two browsers are 100% compatible, nor will they *ever*
>> be. But my "Not true" applied to your claim that a lot of people need
>>this information inorder to modify his code for every browser. That is
>>not true now.
>
>
> To some extent... Firebird doesn't have any control of security
> certificates, and it doesn't have Midas. That kind of thing is relevant
> to some types of site developers.
As has been remarked several times in this group and elsewhere, the
exclusion of "Midas" (please don't use that name, it's trademarked), aka
contentEditable support, from Mozilla Firebird, was a bug that will be
fixed in the near term.
I'm glad you read the rest of what I wrote and replied (again). My
point about web standard content still being authorable now, independent
of a Mozilla Firebird 1.0 release date being set in stone, still stands.
Anyone using advanced features formerly found only in IE, such as
contentEditable, will have to play it by ear until Firebird 0.7 is out.
Such content authors were not the ones Rainer and I were discussing.
>>The only thing that's hard to understand, it seems, it that we can't and
>>won't claim to predict the future, needlessly and hopelessly, I should add.
>
>
> who is "we".
Anyone on st...@mozilla.org or dri...@mozilla.org. The people who
actually decide on when things release and what goes into the source
tree, when.
Various Mozilla people have made various predictions in
> various places (meeting minutes, misquotes included; blog comments; the
> branding document; the old Firebird roadmap - that's still up and still
> says Firebird 0.7 will be in July). All that stuff has already been
> picked up, and some of it has made it onto cnet, slashdot, etc.
Ain't the web great?
What's your point? I can't hope to muzzle all the bloggers among our
developers. No one is blogging that we'll ship by a certain date.
There is no bad press over our having been late (again), as there was
leading up to 1.0. And (to repeat something I wrote earlier in this
thread) we are better off being late, at higher quality, than rushing at
the cost of quality.
Mozilla 1.0 rightly came years after Netscape 6.
Mozilla and Netscape can be faulted for rewriting too much code (I
should know; I was an advocate within Netscape in 1997 of not throwing
away the old codebase, but incrementally improving it and continuing to
ship Netscape releases; I was overruled). But given the decision in
1998 to rewrite most of the code, the consequence of a Mozilla 1.0 four
years later followed pretty much inevitably. And we had to rewrite in
1998 -- we didn't have enough developers willing to hack on the old,
messy codebase.
I'm going into this detail on 1.0 not because I expect we'll take four
years to get to a Mozilla Firebird 1.0 -- that's silly, we're talking
three or four orders of magnitude less code to write -- but because we
have the same kinds of scheduling problems: not knowing which bugs are
most vital to fix without iterating through some milestones, knowing
about bugs we must fix without having scheduled all the work to fix
them, etc.
It's therefore important to iterate. If you expect some perfect Gantt
chart leading up to a fixed release date to be announced once, in the
short run, you will be disappointed. See the Mozilla 1.0 manifesto for
a likelier sort of approach.
>>You're right that the roadmap needs another update. It'll take a little
>>while to get a schedule worked out in light of the good news of the
>>Mozilla Foundation. I hope you can be patient while we work out the
>>details.
>
>
> I think it's pretty obvious that people can't be patient. People have
> been asking detailed questions about this stuff for 3 or 4 months - when
> Mozilla doesn't answer the questions, people find and/or make up their own
> answers, which may or may not be the right ones.
It's obvious people can't be patient, but three or four months ago there
was no Mozilla Foundation, and there might never have been one.
I'm sure my words here won't change human nature, but you are barking up
the wrong tree if you wanted some kind of master plan three months ago.
The new roadmap proposing the new application architecture went up
less than four months ago (2-Apr-2003).
> Another example that's just being argued in the mozillazine forums -
> Firebird and Thunderbird are both up on download.com, and Firebird is
> getting some pretty bad ratings. Blake seems to be upset by this and is
> asking people to go there and give it positive ratings.
I haven't followed any of that -- what are the bad reviews about? Are
they all from Mac users?
> If Firebird and Thunderbird are ready to be distributed to the world on
> download.com, and heavily advertised on the Mozilla.org front page with a
> kind of "switch" campaign, then you shouldn't still be asking people to be
> patient and wait for a roadmap...
The front page of mozilla.org calls Mozilla Firebird a technology
preview. The link telling "why people everywhere are switching" is not
a "switch campaign", it's a summary of reasons people are using the
preview releases, with full knowledge that they are not yet at 1.0.
Those users do not need a roadmap update in order to switch and be happy
with the product.
/be
Brendan Eich
>My 2p... I realise you probably wanted elaboration from Brendan or a
>Mozilla person rather than someone else speculating...
>
My speculations about things like "1.0" schedules aren't much better
than any other informed member of the community. In fact we depend on
lots of people coming to agree that we've reached a sufficient level of
quality.
So when I update the roadmap, it won't be to speculate. It'll be to
talk about future milestones, how known bugs are scheduled across them,
how people can help, and where we added slack for unknown bugs and
delays fixing all the critical bugs.
/be
Brendan Eich
Yeah, things have been hectic (also in the months leading up to the big
good news about the Mozilla Foundation). Sorry about the problem, and
thanks (finally) for the bit of understanding.
/be
Brendan Eich
> As has been remarked several times in this group and elsewhere, the
> exclusion of "Midas" (please don't use that name, it's trademarked), aka
> contentEditable support, from Mozilla Firebird, was a bug that will be
> fixed in the near term.
... and is fixed in 0.6.1 and in the daily builds.
/be
Matthias Versen
>> area that needs work is definitely QA. A lot of bug reports are of
>> very bad quality, are filed with months-old builds, are not tested
>> against seamonkey, etc.
>>
>> Some help in testing and triaging would definitely be appreciated.
>>
>
> Seamonkey QA is worse with 2 year old bugs and QA contacts that do nothing
We are in this situation because many reporter never answer or they
can't give additional informations
and because bugzilla is flooded with bugs (we have 6000-7000 Unconfirmed
Bugs in Bugzilla).
And we also have not enough people helping with bug triage.
Matthias
--
Please delete everything between "matti" and the "@" in my mail address.
Adam Becevello
> John Smith wrote:
>
>>> area that needs work is definitely QA. A lot of bug reports are of
>>> very bad quality, are filed with months-old builds, are not tested
>>> against seamonkey, etc.
>>>
>>> Some help in testing and triaging would definitely be appreciated.
>>>
>>
>> Seamonkey QA is worse with 2 year old bugs and QA contacts that do
>> nothing
>
>
> We are in this situation because many reporter never answer or they
> can't give additional informations
> and because bugzilla is flooded with bugs (we have 6000-7000 Unconfirmed
> Bugs in Bugzilla).
> And we also have not enough people helping with bug triage.
>
> Matthias
I have begun helping out with bug triage by going through Firebird's
unconfirmed bugs and trying to determine if they're still valid. In the
last 10 minutes I've seen 5 bug reports where the reporter hasn't
replied at all, despite repeated attempts by different people for more
information. Between this fact, some completely useless steps to
reproduce that don't work and the fact that I can't resolve any bugs (I
can only confirm), I'm quickly realizing that this is slow work.
I believe the call-to-arms by Blake in the Mozillazine forums
(http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=127748#127748) should
help out with Firebird's bug list. I only hope something can be done
with Seamonkey's HUGE list.
Michael Lefevre
>> certificates, and it doesn't have Midas. That kind of thing is relevant
>> to some types of site developers.
>
> As has been remarked several times in this group and elsewhere, the
> exclusion of "Midas" (please don't use that name, it's trademarked), aka
> contentEditable support, from Mozilla Firebird, was a bug that will be
> fixed in the near term.
and in fact has been, as I've learnt from this thread...
[snip]
>>>The only thing that's hard to understand, it seems, it that we can't and
>>>won't claim to predict the future, needlessly and hopelessly, I should add.
>>
>> who is "we".
>
> Anyone on st...@mozilla.org or dri...@mozilla.org. The people who
> actually decide on when things release and what goes into the source
> tree, when.
I imagine I could find "needless" predictions of the future from some of
those people if I tried, but I won't.
> Ain't the web great?
>
> What's your point? I can't hope to muzzle all the bloggers among our
> developers. No one is blogging that we'll ship by a certain date.
> There is no bad press over our having been late (again), as there was
> leading up to 1.0. And (to repeat something I wrote earlier in this
> thread) we are better off being late, at higher quality, than rushing at
> the cost of quality.
The point is that people want predictions, and if they don't get official
ones of any kind, they'll take whatever they think they've found and
misread it, so you may as well make some kind of prediction. Failing
that, Firebird's old bug-driven roadmap worked ok (except that it had
estimated dates that weren't updated enough). Providing a set of criteria
is fine. And I quite agree with being late, at higher quality (something
which seems to have failed to happen recently - 1.2 lacked QA and a 1.2.1
was necessary, then 1.3 and 1.4 seem both to have been released with
significant known problems, on the grounds they could be fixed up in a
x.x.1 release - although I understand that the 1.4 schedule may not have
been entirely of Mozilla.org's choosing)
> Mozilla and Netscape can be faulted for rewriting too much code
[snip]
> It's obvious people can't be patient, but three or four months ago there
> was no Mozilla Foundation, and there might never have been one.
>
> I'm sure my words here won't change human nature, but you are barking up
> the wrong tree if you wanted some kind of master plan three months ago.
> The new roadmap proposing the new application architecture went up
> less than four months ago (2-Apr-2003).
Sure. However, the proposal was apparently agreed not a huge amount of
time after that, and I would kind of hope that from that point, further
work would be done with a view to bringing things together, rather than
simply working at the bottom level without regard to the bigger picture.
Lack of sight of the bigger picture is surely something that can lead to
rewriting code.
>> Another example that's just being argued in the mozillazine forums -
>> Firebird and Thunderbird are both up on download.com, and Firebird is
>> getting some pretty bad ratings. Blake seems to be upset by this and is
>> asking people to go there and give it positive ratings.
>
> I haven't followed any of that -- what are the bad reviews about? Are
> they all from Mac users?
This is another case of my conflating points :) The exceptionally bad
reviews were generated by a bunch of trolls, apparently following someone
advocating that people should go and post positive comments. As a
response to this, Blake asked people to go and post positive comments, and
then observed that the rating had got stuck.
However, a number of the reviews did raise real issues about flaws and
incompleteness of Firebird 0.6. And a Mac site did give Firebird 0.6 a
seriously bad write up recently as well.
> The front page of mozilla.org calls Mozilla Firebird a technology
> preview. The link telling "why people everywhere are switching" is not
> a "switch campaign", it's a summary of reasons people are using the
> preview releases, with full knowledge that they are not yet at 1.0.
> Those users do not need a roadmap update in order to switch and be happy
> with the product.
Some users don't. Other users, however, have been talking about not using
Netscape 7.1 and/or Mozilla 1.4 on the grounds that they have no future.
Similarly, people are talking about the death of IE, because it's been
reported that there isn't going to be further work on the standalone
version and it's rendering. I could understand the position if one was
talking about rolling the product out across a large organisation; it
doesn't make much sense for people who are switching browsers on a weekly
basis to stop using something simply because it may not have a very long
term future... However, it still happens, and those people would be happy
with a roadmap update.
Anyway, thanks for the replies (although I could've made do with just a
couple of them, you didn't need to reply to all the rants...)
--
Michael
Matthias Versen
>> We are in this situation because many reporter never answer or they
>> can't give additional informations
>> and because bugzilla is flooded with bugs (we have 6000-7000
>> Unconfirmed Bugs in Bugzilla).
>> And we also have not enough people helping with bug triage.
>>
>> Matthias
>
>
> I have begun helping out with bug triage by going through Firebird's
> unconfirmed bugs and trying to determine if they're still valid. In the
> last 10 minutes I've seen 5 bug reports where the reporter hasn't
> replied at all, despite repeated attempts by different people for more
> information. Between this fact, some completely useless steps to
> reproduce that don't work and the fact that I can't resolve any bugs (I
> can only confirm), I'm quickly realizing that this is slow work.
It could be a problem that many people don't know that they can't reply
the bugzilla mail. I get very often mails from people who redirect it a
mail that they send via reply and it bounced.
And it's of course frustrating (for me) if you traige bugs and confirm
one but you know that this bug will not be fixed in the next 2 years :-(
Michael Lefevre
So they are... I hadn't even noticed that they had reappeared on the home
page. They still need some updating though...
--
Michael
Christopher S. Charabaruk
project names is going on with Firebird and Thunderbird, myself. AFAIK,
Sunbird (the standalone calendar) is only known as such as a project
name, it remains branded as "Mozilla Calendar" for users (and if not,
I'll be bringing that up with Mostafa).
So, again, why is Firebird (and Thunderbird) going on as if they'll be
named such for all eternity?
Michael Lefevre wrote:
> What's going on with the Firebird name anyway - it has a nice new icon to
> go with the "Firebird" name. How does this fit in with "Mozilla Firebird"
> being a transitory name, not to be used without the pre-pended Mozilla...
> has the previous branding policy been dumped, or is Mozilla.org just
> breaking it's own policy?
--
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk <coldacid.djfly@org>
Meldstar Entertainment -- Creation, cubed.
I failed the Turing test.
Simon Paquet
>> Seamonkey QA is worse with 2 year old bugs and QA contacts that
>> do nothing
>
> We are in this situation because many reporter never answer or
> they can't give additional informations
If a reporter doesn't answer questions directed to him in a
certain period of time (4-8 weeks seems reasonable) and the
triager can't verify it then the bug should be marked WFM.
--
Simon Paquet
http://sipaq.blogspot.com - Simon's Mozilla Blog
Boris Zbarsky
> If a reporter doesn't answer questions directed to him in a
> certain period of time (4-8 weeks seems reasonable) and the
> triager can't verify it then the bug should be marked WFM.
Assuming the triager is using the same operating system, yes. I've seen
plenty of platform-specific bugs marked WFM by people who were testing
on a different platform.
Michael Lefevre
which does raise something of an issue - what happens with bugs that
cannot be reproduced?
for example, there was a (somewhat vague) bug report involving a dual
monitor setup with a specific graphics card, on Mozilla 1.1 or 1.2 or
something quite old. Then the reporter changed machines or whatever, and
had no way of reproducing the bug.
The bug was marked WFM, and I verified that with a comment that it wasn't
really right, but I didn't see an alternative.
That's a rather extreme example, but there are plenty of bugs with similar
issues - the reporter isn't around, and the chances of anyone else
reproducing it based on the report are slim to none. Should those bugs
just remain open forever on the grounds that some day in the future
someone might come across them again?
--
Michael
Boris Zbarsky
> That's a rather extreme example, but there are plenty of bugs with similar
> issues - the reporter isn't around, and the chances of anyone else
> reproducing it based on the report are slim to none. Should those bugs
> just remain open forever on the grounds that some day in the future
> someone might come across them again?
No one will come across a 1-in-50000 bug "again", really... In my
opinion if bugs are no longer reproducible by anyone, they should be
marked WFM.
This is my private opinion, of course, not policy. ;)
-Boris