Thunderbird/July2012AndBeyond

Here is a list of the comments we received so far on TB-Planning. Our goal here is to gather all of them on the same page to get conversation "started"

Tanstaalf: long standing issues – like the buggy HTML editor, - buggy IMAP behavior, - the new Address Book, - maildir vs mbox for local storage, - full integration of the Calendar (Lightning extension), as just a few examples

ben bucksch What we're still lacking in professional setups is a calendar. Lighting is almost there. We just need to ship it and then polish it.

Alan Lord I can't tell you how many times I've seen question on the OpenOffice (now LibreOffice) lists asking about an Outlook 'component' - maybe now is the time to start discussions with them about some kind of collaboration under the Document Foundation umbrella?

Kai Engert - ehsan akhgari The one thing I'm worried about is regressions: Firefox and Thunderbird share application level code that is responsible for the correct functioning of security protocols. I'm worried there are only two approaches to this dilemma. (a) Tell developers to do what I suggested above - keep core functionality - implement new core functionality in addition. This strategy would be very helpful to allow Thunderbird with the most recent(and most secure) Mozilla platform code. or (b) In order to avoid being broken, accept that Thunderbird might have to fork portions of the Gecko code, in order to remain compatible. But as soon as we go that path, we might soon see Thunderbird having to use a full fork of Gecko and fall behind. I don't think we'd be happy with this scenario.

I therefore propose that we make it a rule that developers must follow strategy (a). If developers want to remove or replace a functionality in core Gecko, they must not do it until someone has contributed a working adjustment to Thunderbird code.

Joshua Cranmer We only have ~50-60% coverage of our own code by unit tests. Most problems won't be found except by people using the product (sadly).

Karsten If you move away from Gecko Core, you're doomed, given the number of actual developers working on Thunderbird. Especially since no Gecko person will then care anymore whether something breaks for us or not.

Kai Knowing about a regression is important, but is not sufficient. Even known regressions are sometimes being deliberately ignored (or potential fixing gets postponed to "unknown"). For example, since Thunderbird 10 we have no error feedback for many protocol errors on SSL/TLS connections. If there's a problem with a connection to a server, it simply doesn't work, without user feedback.