June 30, 2009

Thunderbird 3.0b3 dates

At today's thunderbird-drivers meeting, we agreed on Thunderbird 3.0b3 dates (times of 23:59 US/Pacific, as usual):

  • Slushy String freeze date: 2009-07-02 (Thur)
  • Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-07-07 (Tues)
  • Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-07-14 (Tues)
  • l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-07-16 (Thur)
  • Target Ship date: 2009-07-21 (Tues)

Posted by dmose at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2009

Getting 3.0b3 shipped

Late last week, drivers spent some time discussing where we were at on the Thunderbird 3.0b3 front. We came to a decision that there's more value to be had by getting 3.0b3 out the door quickly than by continuing to hold it waiting for the last piece of the great search refactoring and the subsequent regression fixes.

The reasoning is this: beta 3 has already taken a long time, and it's felt somewhat stalled waiting on one set of things for a little while now. It was observed that there are now enough front-end changes stacked up in the tree that 3.0b2 bug reports have significantly decreased in value, and that effect is accelerating. Most importantly, it was pointed out that if we ship a milestone sooner rather than later, it helps replace that feeling of being stalled with a feeling of ongoing momentum.

What are the bigger picture consequences of doing this? Clearly, defaulted-on-GloDa search doesn't happen until b4. Then, as soon as b3 ships, we start going through the complete Tb3 blocker lists with a long knife, hopefully cutting enough that we end up feeling that our current ship targets are realistic.

This change in plans feels to me like it's mostly about partitioning the remaining Tb3 work to our advantage; it doesn't ultimately change the amount of work that we need to do.

So, where does that leave us in terms of beta 3? I've done a bunch of bug triage today, and I'll be proposing some dates in an email to dev-apps-thunderbird shortly. My expectation is that we'll come out of tomorrow's driver meeting with dates that we can work with.

Posted by dmose at 5:41 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2009

Thunderbird review and submodules

We've talked about pursuing the benefits of specialization in the Thunderbird review ecosystem occasionally for a while now.

Over the last year or so, Andrew Sutherland has written lots of excellent, well-documented, well-tested code. It's been obvious to a number of us for a while that Andrew would make a fine reviewer and module owner and that the comm-central community has been missing out by not yet offering him the chance to apply his talents this way.

Recent landings have made it particularly clear that there are increasingly large areas of code in the tree that should be under his supervision: none of the rest of us know it as well as he does, nor do we have the same vision for how it should evolve.

So, in an overdue move, we've created several new modules. Under mailnews/:

  • GloDa (the global message database

and under mail/:

  • Message list (thread pane)
  • Tab UI

The expectation is that where there aren't initially module peers, Andrew will add them as it becomes clear to him which people fit those roles best.

Thanks, Andrew, for the good work you've already done and for agreeing to help with module ownership and reviewing going forward!

In the bigger picture, there are more sub-modules that we can and will split out as time goes on, but these seemed like the most important ones to make happen now.

Posted by dmose at 5:45 PM | Comments (1)