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Much anticipated trunk news

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Written on 13 Jan 2008, last updated 19 Mar 2008.

With the conclusion of Thunderbird 1.5.0.x ending with the possible last major update to Thunderbird 2.0.0.x, it is now time to refocus on trunk development that has occurred ever since Gecko 1.8 got branched on 12 August 2005 almost 2.5 years ago.

I came up with a query that tracks development on trunk builds that did not make it to 1.5 or 2.0, and the following are some examples of notable fixes that have made it (or will be making it) into Thunderbird 3. Please note that the list is not meant to be comprehensive, and some bugs in the query itself may not be relevant. Work-in-progress bugs may not necessarily make it into version 3.

Fixed:

Work-in-progress: (Can be anything from enhancements to blockers)

The main query (~130 bugs) (~650) can be found here. A separate query similar to the main one, but for assigned and reopened bugs (~60) (~300) is also available.

<jargon>Main query goes like this: all thunderbird components + all mailnews components except installer, security and build config. No keywords: fixed-aviary1.0* fixed1.4* fixed1.8*, verified1.8*, crash, topcrash, regression, footprint, mlk. Marked resolved, verified, closed, fixed. Duration from 2005-08-12 to 2008-01-10, with resolution turning into fixed during this period. All have target milestone of mozilla1.9*, mozilla2.0, thunderbird 3 or future. -Edited to remove "footprint" keyword and target milestones.</jargon> (The focus is till 2008-01-10 trunk builds)

Sidenote: Eudora is now at version 8.0.0b2 (17 Dec 2007). Significance? "It is now based on the trunk code of Thunderbird: version 3.0a1pre. Some of the main new features of the trunk Thunderbird are the tabs interface for mailboxes and messages (right-click and select "Open in New Tab"), and the integration with the Mac OS X address book" (Penelope version 0.1a22, Thunderbird 3.0a1pre trunk code as of 2007/10/19)

"Eudora is a mail and news application from Qualcomm based on the open source Thunderbird client from Mozilla. It's *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it." There may be a point in time in the future where Eudora features may make it into Thunderbird and vice versa, by complementing each other.

Feel free to add details below by posting a comment and providing a bug number if you see one worthy of making the list above.

Edit 1 (2008-01): Added more stuff. Incorporated changes suggested by James Napolitano. Split into fixed (green) and work-in-progress (red) categories. Added more bugs and architectural notes. Removed colours which made it difficult to read. Added demorkification & Mac Growl support bugs. Links to related blog posts about mork and its issues.

Edit 2 (2008-02): More bugs fixed. Mozilla Add-ons integration added. More in-progress bugs. Eudora 8.0.0b3 released.

Edit 3 (2008-03): More bugs fixed.

Filed under 'Thunderbird Trunk' | Posted on 16 Jan 2008 (Wed) by Gary Kwong at 10:20 PM. (GMT+8)

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Comments

There's an issue with the queries you used; often developers don't bother setting the target milestone. If you remove that requirement from the search, you get over 600 fixed bugs. I'd also remove 'footprint' from the list of excluded keywords; many refactoring bugs use that.

There's a lot of architecture work that's going on to convert the mail code to use frozen linkages, which will go a long way to enabling Thunderbird to run on top of XULRunner.

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Architecture_Cleanup

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377319
Convert mailnews to frozen linkages (tracking bug).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379070 Remove nsXPIDLCString and nsXPIDLString from mailnews (looks mostly done).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395701
mailnews should use nsStringGlue and other Glue code (WIP).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379431
Remove xpcom_obsolete from mailnews and mail (done).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=394167
Remove |nsISupportsArray| usage in mailnews (WIP).

There's also been some good work cleaning up the address book code: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=287832
Clean up nsDirPrefs.cpp (done).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86405
Make LDAP addressbooks editable (WIP).

Posted by: James Napolitano at January 13, 2008 11:23 AM

OKAY, WHEN WILL "THUNDERBIRD" (3) BE RELEASED-OUT FO REAL?

Posted by: STEPHEN at January 15, 2008 6:58 AM

I'd say given the attention that the trunk is getting, we won't see TB3 until Q1 2009.

Posted by: Ali at February 18, 2008 12:13 AM

Awh Why?? I'm an IT Specialist across all OS Systems - Win/Linux/Mac
So what's holding you back?
Thunderbird is WAY faster and better than MS Outlook / Express, and Mail or Mac / MS Entourage! It's even better than KMail / Icedove!!!

Posted by: XEON_JACKAL at February 29, 2008 3:41 PM

Xeon -

Icedove is a re-skinned version of Thunderbird. How can there be a performance difference?

Posted by: Munroe at March 18, 2008 9:44 PM

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