On 2015-10-23 5:20 PM, R Kent James wrote:
On 10/23/2015 1:21 PM, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:
What are the long term plans for the Thunderbird and SeaMonkey community
to maintain their code, if it gets merged into m-c? On tb-planning I
see ongoing discussions about moving to other platforms such as
Electron, or the broader doubts about how Thunderbird wants to deal with
future upcoming changes such as the current add-ons?
Without long term plans for the code being maintained, we should not
move it into m-c.
Several core Thunderbird team members are meeting with Mark Surman in
Toronto next week to discuss establishing Thunderbird as a formal
Mozilla Foundation project (which looks very likely to happen). Part of
that will be implementing our funding plan, which is targeted at having
$500,000 per year available for Thunderbird maintenance and enhancement.
Financial support from MoFo on Thunderbird has no bearing on the
technical details under discussion here, as far as I understand. That
money can be spent on keeping up with upstream changes, moving away from
Gecko, or anything else.
So yes we are working quite diligently on long-term plans for
Thunderbird code maintenance and enhancement. (I can't speak for
SeaMonkey). We recognize that the status quo has been less than optimal,
and we are working hard to improve that. Funny though, in spite of many
mishaps and new competition, our user base keeps growing (new record
this week of 9.6 million ADI!).
The user base also has no bearing on the discussion at hand. Think of
it this way, if Thunderbird had 10x the user base of Firefox, we would
still be having the exact same conversation.
As for discussions about other options on tb-planning, you need to
consider those in the same context as other similar discussions about
Firefox. I've seen comments about Firefox moving to servo, and of course
there is the well-known deprecation of XUL, both of which will result in
large existing portions of m-c being made obsolete. Just as the Firefox
hg repos will adapt to their changes, so the Thunderbird hg repos will
adapt to changes.
That doesn't answer my question.
Let me rephrase. Are Thunderbird and SeaMonkey committed towards long
term maintenance of their code, should it be moved into mozilla-central?
That is the bare minimum necessary (but not sufficient) condition for
having this conversation.
From what I have seen in the aforementioned forum, it seems like at
least on the Thunderbird side things are pretty much unclear at this
point, so the answer to the above question cannot be yes.
I am not in favor of moving the repo unless if there is full commitment
towards that long term maintenance.
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