Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting of Wednesday 26th February 2003

Wednesday March 5th, 2003

The minutes of the mozilla.org staff meeting of Wednesday 26th February 2003 are now online. Issues discussed include Camino, the 1.3 final release, the 1.4 release cycle, the new roadmap, the next Phoenix release, the appointment of Marcia Knous as a mozilla.org Staff Associate Member, the new Mozilla MinGW port, mail about porting fixes to 1.0 branch and reorganisation of the mozilla.org front page navigation.

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#1 good changes for 1.4!

by TheK

Wednesday March 5th, 2003 7:02 PM

these changes shound very good, especially the point to fix blockers, not fun-features! Another point would be, to get the contributors to fix more crash/hang/dataloss bugs

#2 Re: good changes for 1.4!

by AlexBishop

Wednesday March 5th, 2003 7:03 PM

"Another point would be, to get the contributors to fix more crash/hang/dataloss bugs"

Problem is, you can't force contributors to do anything.

Alex

#24 Re: Re: good changes for 1.4!

by TheK

Thursday March 6th, 2003 12:05 PM

so staff members must find some guys to fix these bugs.

#3 Re: good changes for 1.4!

by bzbarsky

Wednesday March 5th, 2003 7:22 PM

> these changes shound very good, especially the point to fix blockers, not fun-features!

One person's fun-feature is another's blocker (eg look at Midas -- this is a blocker for some people embedding Gecko, apparently, so they get work done on it (by paying for said work); same applies to Calendar).

#25 Re: Re: good changes for 1.4!

by TheK

Thursday March 6th, 2003 12:09 PM

for what do we have votes, priorities and severity?

#28 Re: Re: Re: good changes for 1.4!

by bzbarsky

Thursday March 6th, 2003 1:06 PM

Priorities are for developers to be able to sort their bugs. Severity is a way of marking bugs as to how much they hinder daily use of the browser (both midas and the kitchen sink would have "rfe" severity, eg).

Votes are there to make people feel good and reduce bugspam. ;)

#32 votes...

by djk

Thursday March 6th, 2003 1:28 PM

> Votes are there to make people feel good and reduce bugspam. ;)

Actually, I use votes to flag 'important' bugs that I want to get more bugmail about than those I'm merely CC'd on.

Too bad I only get 10 votes for Browser. :-(

/me wishes for an 'important to me' flag in bugzilla and corresponding mail prefs.

#34 Re: votes...

by TheK

Thursday March 6th, 2003 3:40 PM

forget the votes - as Boris said, it would be better to remove them, they have exaktly no effect.

#36 Re: Re: votes...

by james

Thursday March 6th, 2003 7:29 PM

Votes can be used to push a bug from UNCONFIRMED state to NEW. That is one case where they can actually do something (although if the component is being carefully triaged, real bugs should be moved out of the UNCONFIRMED state before this happens). Other than that, the votes are just a number that displays on the bug page.

#39 Re: Re: Re: votes...

by asa

Friday March 7th, 2003 10:43 AM

If I'm some random open source developer wants to get involved with Mozilla, or if a regular Mozilla developer is looking for some new feature to work on, votes are a good place to see where he might get the most "fame" for the fix. Voting doesn't necessarily change the project priorities but it may influence individual prioroities of individual contributors and it may influence project management in some cases.

Right now there are 10 bugs with more than 50 votes. There are over 50 fixed bugs with more than 20 votes. There are about 150 fixed bugs that currently have more than 10 votes. Keep in mind that most people move their votes when a bug gets fixed so those are bugs where the votes haven't all already been moved and which probably had many more votes before they were fixed. To repeat, most of those bugs had lots more votes before the bug got fixed. Active voters tend to move all their votes to the next bug(s) they care about once a bug has been fixed.

Votes are probably not _the_ deciding factor for anyone evaluating a bug but they can be _a_ factor. Just as a nomination for fixing a bug by a particular milestonee isn't _the_ deciding factor for drivers@mozilla.org, it is definitely _a_ deciding factor. Just as severity isn't _the_ deciding factor, etc., etc.

Lots of things are taken into consideration by the different people and groups that evaluate bugs for different reasons. Votes are payed some attention by some of the people making these evaluations. They are not "just a number that displays on the bug page."

Feel free to encourage people not to vote by telling them that votes are completely useless but know that you're misinforming them and potentially taking away one of their mechanisms for making their wishes known to drivers@mozilla.org (since I'm a driver and I watch votes) and to the developers that do now or might in the future use votes to decide which feature to add or bug to fix next. Just because you think votes don't have enough weight doesn't mean that they don't have any weight.

--Asa

#41 Re: Re: Re: Re: votes...

by TheK

Friday March 7th, 2003 1:09 PM

10 Bugs with more than 50 Votes? There are 40. And 5 of them are critical. Hwry nice one is here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104778 - 91 Votes, critical, "mozilla1.3", "dataloss" and "nsbeta1+" keywords - I don#t know, what else it needs to become a very important bug.

#42 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: votes...

by AlexBishop

Friday March 7th, 2003 1:32 PM

"Hwry nice one is here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104778 - 91 Votes, critical, 'mozilla1.3', 'dataloss' and 'nsbeta1+' keywords - I don#t know, what else it needs to become a very important bug."

The 'nsbeta1+' keyword would suggest that Netscape plan to fix it in time for their next release.

Alex

#43 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: votes...

by TheK

Friday March 7th, 2003 4:45 PM

it sits there since 2002-07-16 and waits for this coming true...

#44 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: votes...

by asa

Friday March 7th, 2003 5:31 PM

I intended to write "10 _fixed_ bugs with more than 50 votes". My point is that many bugs which have accumulated tens or even more than 100 votes do get fixed. Often voted for bugs do get fixed. They don't always get the priority it seems that voters crave.

I also failed to note something I did in my previous post on voting which is that there are 88,000+ bugzilla accounts. That means for a bug with 100 votes, approximately one tenth of one percent of the people that could have voted for the bug actually did. 0.11% isn't necessarily an indicator of much.

Flash blocking has almost 3 times as many votes as the bug you linked to. Should we implement flash blocking first? PGP for mail has more than 4 times the votes of the bug you linked to. Is it 4 times more important? Implementing x-forms has more than twice as many votes. Is it twice as important?

My point is that votes are just _one_ indicator. They are disproportionately used for features that people would like and are seldom used on issues that are genuine blockers to development and use. Votes matter. They just don't matter as much as people would like them to.

When 20%, heck, when 10% of bugzilla users vote for fixing a real bug I'll stop everything else I'm doing and work to get that bug fixed. 10% too high? How about 2%. No? Then how about 1%. When 1% of the people who have the ability to vote for a bug actually do, then I'll start to listen to those that believe votes should matter more than they currently do. Until then, votes for me will remain just _one_ useful indicator for what a very small vocal minority thinks should be fixed/implemented and not a lot more. That's not to say it's not a valuable indicator. Votes informed me that a PGP plug-in for mail was 4 times more desired by the vocal minority than a fix for your URLbar dataloss issue ;-)

--Asa

#45 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: votes...

by TheK

Saturday March 8th, 2003 5:04 AM

typical numbers: if 4 people tell you to have a problem, 100 have this problem and each of them will tell 10 other people.

#33 Re: Re: Re: Re: good changes for 1.4!

by TheK

Thursday March 6th, 2003 3:39 PM

well, so severity should and help to find the order to fix the bugs, as a bug, which hinders daily use prevent many from kicking MSIE - which would be important to speed up TE.

#27 Re: Re: good changes for 1.4!

by fletchsod

Thursday March 6th, 2003 12:22 PM

I thought the Calender make a nice addition to Mozilla. Are you saying that Calender aren't developed by somebody at Mozilla? If so, then who create the Mail/News product to Mozilla?

#29 Re: Re: Re: good changes for 1.4!

by bzbarsky

Thursday March 6th, 2003 1:07 PM

Calendar is developed by a company called Oeone, pretty much exclusively. Mail/News is developed by a company called Netscape, pretty much exclusively.

Both are hosted by mozilla.org.

#4 Reorganisation of website

by jgraham

Thursday March 6th, 2003 1:19 AM

I guess this will be done without fixing bug 65786 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65768 ?

#12 Re: Reorganisation of website

by GAThrawn

Thursday March 6th, 2003 6:42 AM

Well it looks like Asa is putting the prototype together, and he's certainly heard of standards. His blog has had some pretty impressive pure CSS layouts on it in the past, and I'm pretty sure it still validates at the moment.

#26 I should say

by jgraham

Thursday March 6th, 2003 12:14 PM

I didn't intend to sound negative. I just thought it would have been mentioned if the site were to be substantially redesigned to an (x)html + css basis. Instead the minutes talk about 'changing the navigation', which sounds like a more minor adjustment. Of course I'm more than happy to be proven wrong - it's a bit sad that mozilla.org doesn't display the possibilities that having a range of good, standards compliant browsers (particually gecko based browsers) on the market gives. After all, it is quite hard to persuade other people that the browser market is now mature enough to support css layout and valid, (both syntatically and semantically) code if the browser makers themselves don't use it on their main site.

Of course, I realise that all the people at mozilla.org realise this and that, originally the site needed to work under Netscape 4, and so on. My question was really that; is this change also going to fix the use of standards in the way they were intended or is it, as I suspect, a more minor alteration?

#35 Re: I should say

by asa

Thursday March 6th, 2003 7:22 PM

When you're offering to do the work to create a standards showcase redesign of the website that degrades well in most other browsers the we should talk.

--Asa

#37 Re:I should say

by jgraham

Friday March 7th, 2003 1:16 AM

Okay.

#5 mingw port

by illsleydc

Thursday March 6th, 2003 1:28 AM

The mingw port (bug 134113) is a great thing for the mozilla project and something we should shout about when finished. Porting a massive windows app to not use MSVC is great and should be an inspiration to others. It also lowers the barriers to entry massively to no non-free software and a minimal install. Hopefully this will encourage people to download and get involved on the windows platform

Go cls!

#22 Developer productivity

by Malc

Thursday March 6th, 2003 10:19 AM

How does this affect a developers ability to debug in Visual Studio, or use integrated add-on products like BoundsChecker, TrueCoverage, TrueTime, etc? Or do people not use those with Mozilla?

#30 Re: Developer productivity

by bzbarsky

Thursday March 6th, 2003 1:08 PM

If you already have Visual Studio, you just keep building with MSVC++.....

#38 The makefiles are still being maintained?

by Malc

Friday March 7th, 2003 5:47 AM

I was under the impression that they had eliminated the need for VC++. Do they still maintain the build system for it?

#40 Re: The makefiles are still being maintained?

by bzbarsky

Friday March 7th, 2003 10:50 AM

VC++ uses the exact same build system as gcc, and has for months now. The makefile.wins were all CVS removed last summer.

#6 Mozilla 1.4 -> new Netscape release?

by pepejeria

Thursday March 6th, 2003 5:31 AM

Is it true that next Netscape release will be based on 1.4? Or did I dream that I read that somewhere

#8 Re: Mozilla 1.4 -> new Netscape release?

by bandido

Thursday March 6th, 2003 6:14 AM

MAybe the hint is in http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3E662F62.9000703%40mozilla.org . The fist comment on the section about M1.4 might be hinting it ;-)

#10 Re: Re: Mozilla 1.4 -> new Netscape release?

by pepejeria

Thursday March 6th, 2003 6:35 AM

If this is true then i guess it would kill the mozilla 1.0.x releases?

#11 Re: Re: Re: Mozilla 1.4 -> new Netscape release?

by AlexBishop

Thursday March 6th, 2003 6:37 AM

"If this is true then i guess it would kill the mozilla 1.0.x releases?"

But 1.2 killed the 1.0 branch even deader than 1.1 did!

Alex

#14 Re: Re: Re: Re: Mozilla 1.4 -> new Netscape releas

by pepejeria

Thursday March 6th, 2003 7:01 AM

Well not really? Netscape 7 still uses that branch. So its not dead. But if next Netscape release will be based on 1.4 then 1.0 branch is pointless

#15 Re: What happened to the URL bar?

by motobass

Thursday March 6th, 2003 7:23 AM

Not pointless, because others could still be using it in their products. ActiveState uses version 0.9.5 in their Komodo IDE.

#18 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Mozilla 1.4 -> new Netscape re

by AlexBishop

Thursday March 6th, 2003 7:44 AM

It was a mangeloism.

Alex

#20 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Mozilla 1.4 -> new Netscap

by pepejeria

Thursday March 6th, 2003 8:03 AM

Thought you sounded familiar ;-)

#23 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Mozilla 1.4 -> new Netscap

by TheK

Thursday March 6th, 2003 12:04 PM

somebody should explain him, what a stable version is - but I guess he's a Windows-User, and so he only knows beta-calles-stable versions and beta versions, which are so beta, that not even MS can call is different ;)

#7 Whatever happened to Newsbot?

by MarkHB

Thursday March 6th, 2003 6:14 AM

I noticed the removal of the newsbot link http://www.mozilla.org/newsbot/ from the homepage. It seemed like a good idea when it first came out; why did it die?

#9 what's the benefit of mingw?

by webgremlin

Thursday March 6th, 2003 6:27 AM

Removes the dependency on MS libraries? Can it be done without slowing Mozilla on Windows down?

#13 Re: what's the benefit of mingw?

by dantealiegri

Thursday March 6th, 2003 6:58 AM

No, MinGW compiler/linked mozilla will still use things like user32.dll. All it does it allow people on windows to compile/work on mozilla with out having to buy ( or steal : ) a compiler.

#31 Re: what's the benefit of mingw?

by bzbarsky

Thursday March 6th, 2003 1:10 PM

mingw builds will almost certainly be slower than the MSVC++ builds. No one is suggesting switching the mozilla.org binaries to MSVC++ (yet). But this will make it possible for people on Windows to build Mozilla without shelling out big bucks for a compiler...

#16 OT: Help files for Mozilla Mail

by motobass

Thursday March 6th, 2003 7:32 AM

I am looking for a bug in bugzilla re: the lack of help files for Controlling Junk Mail / Using Junk Mail Controls. Does it occur to anyone else that these help files really should be part of the 1.3 final release? This is a great feature which is not intuitive to use.

#17 OT: Help files for Mozilla Mail

by motobass

Thursday March 6th, 2003 7:33 AM

#19 Re: OT: Help files for Mozilla Mail

by AlexBishop

Thursday March 6th, 2003 7:46 AM

"I am looking for a bug in bugzilla re: the lack of help files for Controlling Junk Mail / Using Junk Mail Controls. Does it occur to anyone else that these help files really should be part of the 1.3 final release?"

Based on what's happened in the past, Netscape will probably have help files ready for their next release which will then be donated to Mozilla in due course.

Alex

#21 Re: OT: Help files for Mozilla Mail

by motobass

Thursday March 6th, 2003 9:09 AM

Ah, I see. Also, sorry about the accidental double post.

#46 testing, ignore

by zookqvalem

Saturday March 8th, 2003 7:58 PM

testing, ignore... (Had problem with the account, so testing...)