Thunderbird's Rapid Release Specifics

[Mark Banner]

Something I know we've been missing since switching to the rapid release process, is a document saying what we are doing and how we are going to be working, reflecting the documents that Firefox wrote.

I've now drafted the document and welcome feedback and discussion on it:

http://people.mozilla.org/~mbanner2/tbdevspecifics/

It is hopefully self-explanatory, some topics we've covered already, but there is a lot more about how we're working included in it.

At some stage this document will move to a different more general location.

Mark.

[Kent James]

On 8/4/2011 8:32 AM, Mark Banner wrote:

Something I know we've been missing since switching to the rapid release process, is a document saying what we are doing and how we are going to be working, reflecting the documents that Firefox wrote.

I've now drafted the document and welcome feedback and discussion on it:

http://people.mozilla.org/~mbanner2/tbdevspecifics/

Overall, an excellent document. My only requests are that you add a plan for the timing of increments of the allowable Thunderbird revisions on AMO, and that you be explicit about the allowable timing of changes to interfaces.

 For me, the AMO revision allowed is still an issue that is not being done as I would wish. A binary extension such as mine should ideally do their version updates in the aurora time scale and get reviewed (all of which can take many weeks), so that it is ready for use when beta comes out. (Of course this is only doable if you are disciplined about not doing interface changes late in the aurora timescale). So when beta releases, AMO should already be allowing compatibility with it. But right now for example, with aurora at 7, 7.0 is not an allowed AMO TB version. A binary extension does not want to declare compatibility with the allowed 8.0a1. If you wait until after beta is released to update AMO, then at the (automatic) user beta updates, your extensions are guaranteed to be incompatible, regardless of how diligent the extension author is.

rkent

[Mark Banner]

On 04/08/2011 17:30, Kent James wrote:

Overall, an excellent document. My only requests are that you add a plan for the timing of increments of the allowable Thunderbird revisions on AMO, and that you be explicit about the allowable timing of changes to interfaces.

So I think for the interfaces I've already covered them in the "What happens where?" section. Aurora is generally stable (i.e. we may have to change something if we need to back out). Beta is stable for add-on compatibility.

There's going to be a separate plan that I'm drawing up somewhere on the specific timings, although once I have a bit more info on the FF process, I'll add a note about roughly when we add n.* versions.

For me, the AMO revision allowed is still an issue that is not being done as I would wish. A binary extension such as mine should ideally do their version updates in the aurora time scale and get reviewed (all of which can take many weeks), so that it is ready for use when beta comes out. (Of course this is only doable if you are disciplined about not doing interface changes late in the aurora timescale). So when beta releases, AMO should already be allowing compatibility with it. But right now for example, with aurora at 7, 7.0 is not an allowed AMO TB version. A binary extension does not want to declare compatibility with the allowed 8.0a1. If you wait until after beta is released to update AMO, then at the (automatic) user beta updates, your extensions are guaranteed to be incompatible, regardless of how diligent the extension author is.

I've not been able to confirm this, but my understanding was that binary extensions would have to be recompiled against the beta version even if they were compatible on aurora, as some of the stabilisation of aurora may require it. I may have miss-understood that and I've also can't find the reference :-(

Generally what I expect us to be doing is to migrate a release to aurora, and after a week or two of it being there, we'll add the major version to AMO and do the automatic compatibility bump. This should hopefully mean that we're confident with the interface stability but also give time for extension authors to adapt before we hit beta.

The 7.0 and 7.* have now been added to AMO, it was a slight oversight that this hadn't happened earlier.

Mark.