New Mozilla Project: Stand Alone Mail (Minotaur)

Scott MacGregor

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Mar 24, 2003, 10:54:45 PM3/24/03

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Jason Kersey and I are very excited to announce our effort to build a
stand alone version of mozilla mail, currently called Project Minotaur*.
We are reviving the project started by Seth Spitzer back in September.

Our goal is to produce a cross platform stand alone mail application
using the XUL user interface language. We are modeling ourselves after
the Phoenix rewrite of the Mozilla browser.

Our intended customer is someone who uses Phoenix (or another non
mozilla.exe browser) as their primary browser and wants a mail client
based on mozilla that "plays nice" with their browser.

In addition, by focusing solely on stand alone mail, we believe we can
make some dents in the overall footprint and performance of the mail
client by removing components and chrome we don't need. On top of that,
the UI becomes much cleaner as a stand alone application as opposed to
being part of the mozilla suite.

Minotaur has several new features over mozilla mail including
customizeable toolbars ala Phoenix and a more simplified prefs and menu UI.

We are currently driving towards our 0.1 release which is based off of
the Mozilla 1.3 Branch. After we move to the trunk, our long term goals
will include: moving to the phoenix toolkit and developing a theme
modeled after the Qute theme for Phoenix.

We hope to start pushing builds on ftp.mozilla.org within the next day
or so. For more information, including how to build minotaur, please see
our project page at:

http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/minotaur

Thanks!
-Scott and Jason

P.S. In case I messed up the follow up, please reply to
netscape.mozilla.mailnews.

*As with other Mozilla projects, our code name is subject to change
pending approval/blessing from mozilla.rg staff.
Phoenix --> ??
Chimera --> Camino.
Minotaur --> ???

=)

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 25, 2003, 2:46:47 AM3/25/03

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Scott MacGregor wrote:
> Jason Kersey and I are very excited to announce our effort to build a
> stand alone version of mozilla mail, currently called Project Minotaur*.
> We are reviving the project started by Seth Spitzer back in September.

You guys rock!

--Asa

ahmetaa

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Mar 25, 2003, 8:40:17 AM3/25/03

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Hello.
Very good news. congrats to the people who are working on it. but i
really would be much happier if Phoenix and Minotaur can work on same
GRE. is there any visible plan for that?

Ahmet

Michael Hendy

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Mar 25, 2003, 10:30:59 AM3/25/03

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Just putting my hand up to contribute nightly builds for Linux.

I've just built with the following .mozconfig on a SuSE 8.1 box (using
gcc 3.2), although I'm likely to set up a seperate box offsite to do
them if I get the all clear. Also let me know if you want anything
different...

/* Begin .mozconfig */

ac_add_options --enable-crypto
ac_add_options --disable-mathml
ac_add_options --disable-installer
ac_add_options --disable-activex
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-extensions=wallet
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-optimize=-O2
ac_add_options --without-system-nspr
ac_add_options --without-system-zlib
ac_add_options --without-system-jpeg
ac_add_options --without-system-png
ac_add_options --without-system-mng
export MOZ_MINOTAUR=1
mk_add_options MOZ_MINOTAUR=1

/* End .mozconfig */

--
Michael Hendy
Mozilla PluginDoc - http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/
AIM: Hendikins | ICQ: 45864010 | MSN: hend...@mozdev.org

Don Crandall

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Mar 25, 2003, 10:54:02 AM3/25/03

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If you are still looking for volunteers to build the Mach-o and/or Linux
versions, I am willing to lend a hand, so let me know...

Warm regards
Don

David Tenser

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Mar 25, 2003, 11:34:49 AM3/25/03

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This is great news! I'm the author of Phoenix Help and I'm having plans
on making a similar site for Thunderbird/Minotaur. As with Phoenix Help,
this site will be a user-oriented site with a FAQ, tips, tricks and
other goodies.

/ David

Scott MacGregor

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Mar 25, 2003, 2:10:41 PM3/25/03

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We plan to leverage the GRE in the future but that is after we are up
and running.

-Scott

Marc Randolph

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Mar 25, 2003, 10:31:51 PM3/25/03

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Scott MacGregor <msc...@netscape.com> wrote in message news:<b5ojfg$os...@ripley.netscape.com>...

> Jason Kersey and I are very excited to announce our effort to build a
> stand alone version of mozilla mail, currently called Project Minotaur*.
> We are reviving the project started by Seth Spitzer back in September.
>
> Our goal is to produce a cross platform stand alone mail application
> using the XUL user interface language. We are modeling ourselves after
> the Phoenix rewrite of the Mozilla browser.
>
> Our intended customer is someone who uses Phoenix (or another non
> mozilla.exe browser) as their primary browser and wants a mail client
> based on mozilla that "plays nice" with their browser.
>
> In addition, by focusing solely on stand alone mail, we believe we can
> make some dents in the overall footprint and performance of the mail
> client by removing components and chrome we don't need. On top of that,
> the UI becomes much cleaner as a stand alone application as opposed to
> being part of the mozilla suite.

Howdy Scott,

Sounds like a great project! At the risk of sounding ignorant, are
you planning feature enhancements, or mostly just optimizations as
described above?

If it is possible that new/altered features are introduced in the
stand-alone-mail, is it likely that most of them would find their way
back into Mozilla?

I realize we're talking in broad terms here, but I'm just wondering
what the expectations are.

Thank you,

Marc