Calendar dropping xpfe support
lilmatt
Earlier this year, the Mozilla Calendar team announced that we would
no longer be developing, supporting, or releasing new versions of the
Mozilla Calendar Extension (often referred to as "the xpi"), and would
instead focus all our efforts on the standalone calendaring
application Sunbird, and the calendaring extension for Mozilla
Thunderbird,
code-named "Lightning".
The old extension supported toolkit-based applications such as Firefox,
as
well as older xpfe-based applications such as SeaMonkey. Until
recently,
the team had not intentionally checked in patches that would prevent
folks
from building the old extension from source. Our hope was that the
SeaMonkey
team would have migrated to toolkit before our development work
required
removing xpfe support.
Unfortunately, Calendar development has outpaced SeaMonkey's transition
to
toolkit, and recent, necessary improvements in the Calendar code base
such as
the recent move of all localizations to the /l10n repository and the
new
toolkit-based preferences system for Sunbird do in fact break the old
extension for xpfe-based applications such as SeaMonkey.
As a result, in the very near future we will be disabling support for
building the old extension when building SeaMonkey, and obsolete
xpfe-only
code will be removed from CVS.
SeaMonkey suite users should note that the SeaMonkey team has
expressed interest in adding calendaring in a future, toolkit-based
version of the SeaMonkey suite via the Lightning extension. We are
continuing to discuss such a possibility with them. In the meantime,
we suggest using Sunbird for your calendaring needs.
-lilmatt, for the Mozilla Calendar team
Justin Wood (Callek)
> SeaMonkey suite users should note that the SeaMonkey team has
> expressed interest in adding calendaring in a future, toolkit-based
> version of the SeaMonkey suite via the Lightning extension. We are
> continuing to discuss such a possibility with them. In the meantime,
> we suggest using Sunbird for your calendaring needs.
Just for users (and developers) information, the current plan of the
SeaMonkey developers is to be "toolkit based" for SeaMonkey 1.5, which
is currently based on trunk. (SeaMonkey 1.5 will run on gecko 1.9 and
be released in approximately the same time frame as Firefox 3.)
As a further note, the current trunk has undergone a whole lot of work
for SeaMonkey to support toolkit, while not build as a toolkit app by
default, we are working toward that. (Toolkit based SeaMonkey has a
_lot_ of bugs right now). Codenamed "SuiteRunner" it does build, and is
receiving attention by me and other SeaMonkey developers to bring it up
to par so we can turn it on by default, (which _will_ enable the
"addons-manager" to work, so will make testing things like Lightning
much easier)
And as a Calendar user myself, I have personally stopped using calendar
since its drop from maintenance of the xpfe version, though my need for
it has also dropped in this timeframe. While I cannot wait until it
works in SeaMonkey (as Lightning), and at such a time as the SeaMonkey
folk can discuss a potential "ship with Lightning" distribution.
P.S. Keep up the good work with Calendar, I easily understand the need
to focus attention!
~Justin Wood (Callek)
Justin Wood (Callek)
"SeaMonkey Council" (== equivalent of drivers for SeaMonkey). Nor one of
the "main" developers.
Had to say it incase anyone mistook me as such based on my statements.
~Justin Wood (Callek)