New Mozilla Thunderbird Roadmap PublishedSaturday September 13th, 2003Following the release of Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2, an updated Thunderbird Roadmap has been published. The document outlines the near-term development plans for the standalone mail and newsgroups application and includes details about the forthcoming 0.3 milestone. This release, which will primarily be a bugfix update, will ship at the same time as Mozilla 1.5 and from the same branch. Thunderbird changes made on the trunk will become part of Thunderbird 0.4. ...so will 1.6 start to include firebird & thunderbird or not? It doesn't sound like it based on that. It sounds like they're just timing their releases to be in sync with one another. Well that kind of thing belongs in the Mozilla roadmap rather than the Thunderbird roadmap, and a new Mozilla roadmap is being worked on. But given that it looks like they're sticking to the standard timetable and want releases to be ready to replace the app suite, Mozilla 1.6 alpha will be released in October and there's no way they'll get a Firebird+Thunderbird+other bits bundle ready in that time... This is starting too get really past the joke. This is what I would do (being the Mozilla King): Keep appsuite development going, but only for bugfixes etc. This would be the 1.x branch. The Firebird/Thunberbird builds would be 2.x branch. This is a huge change and warrants a lot more than a 'minor' upgrade. This would let everyone know that the changeover is beginning - otherwise a lot of confusion will be had... Yes, that's a good idea - and a much more realistic one. And I hope that that Mozilla Firebird & Thunderbird won't stay the only standalone-programs. I think it's important to force Mozilla Sunbird a little bit more. But let's wait for the "officials" commenting this. This is a good idea, and would work for other projects pretty well. Mozilla, however, has committed on it's current roadmap to release every 3 mts. That means that the trunk is supposed to release 1.6 at the beginning of September, 1.7 at the beginning of december, 1.8 at the beginning of march, and 1.9 at the beginning of june of next year, making a trunk 2.0 conceivable around September of next year at the current release rate. Given that a combined firebird/thunderbird/sunbird/etc will take a year to get right (someone's blog (?) or a status report - can't find it right now), it may be a good idea to change the trunk release schedule to every 4 months. At the very least it would buy us an extra 4 mts to get things on track for 2.0. I don't think it's a good idea trying to say when a new release will be presented. That doesn't work. If the Mozilla App Suite-Developers limited their ressources on bug-fixes and small enhancements but concentrated on Sunbird, Firebird and Thunderbird, a 2.0-release should be able to be released earlier than in a year. (I hope you understand my english) Many developers are doing the work in their free time. They decide on which parts of the projects they are working. I know at least one developer who currently only wants to work on Seamonkey. After 1.9 comes 1.10, not 2.0. I heard *somewhere* that the major numbers were for major huge-ass changes with the code. Moving to Firebird isn't big enough. If A complete change of the roadmap and a redesign of the components is not a "major huge-ass" change, what else would be a "major huge-ass" change? This "nonrelevant" change will make Mozilla relevant for the commons. Depends how you look at it. It's not a redesign of all the components - it's just changing the UI and splitting it up. Most of the code in Mozilla, Firebird, Thunderbird, etc is in the back-end, and there's no "huge-ass" change in that so far or planned. It depends if you're looking at it from a user point of view or from a developer point of view. The Mozilla version numbering has always been from a developer point of view (otherwise they might have done something like Netscape did - started at 6.0 and gone up to 7.1 in the same time). But I think it's important to number the versions from a user's pont of view because they are the people that should replace their ie through mozilla-products (I see primarily the windows-users). Of course not like netscape did - with changing from 4.7 to 6, but a little bit more like that. The commons have to see that with the standalone-products Mozilla is a real alternative to other products. As you know, most of the already mentioned windows-users see mozilla as an outdated software. I did so as well until I saw Mozilla Firebird a few months ago. With a new version-number the users would see am important change in Mozilla and not only an update. For exchange server support Is there a way that we can form a group, or committee, or even just a meta-tracking bug (whatever can help influence priorities) for issues that hinder Mozilla's acceptance into business use? I'm trying to promote Mozilla within my company, but there are issues like bug# 149049, bug# 97830 (at least until bug# 2920 is implemented), and bug# 104237 which make it hard to get user acceptance in a corporate setting. Just some sort of submission process for issues that might not be important to a "home" user, but really affect decisions in a company. I'm sure that there are probably other bugs that affect other companies to a greater degree than the ones I listed, so some sort of process (or person) to prioritize issues that primarily affect business users and to be an advocate within the Mozilla Foundation's discussions on direction and priorities would be a great help. When is TB going to get a stable nightly location (that I can crontab to) like Firebird? e.g. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firebird/nightly/latest-trunk/MozillaFirebird-win32.zip The last three entries in http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/ are "2003-09-01-trunk", "2003-09-12-1.5", and "2003-09-14-1.5". :-/ |