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Over the last couple of weeks, I've been talking to various people
about our strategies for the new schedule driven releases.<br>
<br>
Originally, we weren't sure if to go for a three or four channel
process (<a
href="http://mozilla.github.com/process-releases/draft/development_overview/">see
Powers of Ten section on the FF overview for info</a>), we were
thinking of something like:<br>
<ul>
<li>Develop our trunk/nightly channel using Experimental as the
back-end</li>
<li>Thunderbird Beta using Beta for the back end</li>
<li>Thunderbird Release using Release<br>
</li>
</ul>
We would have then used the mozilla-central/nightly back-end as the
Canary system.<br>
<br>
However, I think the biggest concern with this is for L10n - the way
Firefox is being set up, is that the Experimental channel (now
called Aurora) is string frozen for L10n. Hence, if we develop our
equivalent of experimental, and then expect L10n to localise on
Beta, I can see some localisers getting confused as to which channel
they are localising where.<br>
<br>
I think there's also the fact that if we haven't got some
development on mozilla-central then we may miss some core bugs that
we don't see until a merge to Aurora.<br>
<br>
Therefore, I think we should go for a one-to-one mapping of:<br>
<ul>
<li>Thunderbird trunk/nightly uses Firefox nightly</li>
<li>Thunderbird Experimental (name TBD) uses Firefox
Experimental/Aurora</li>
<li>Thunderbird Beta uses Firefox Beta</li>
<li>Thunderbird Release uses Firefox Release</li>
</ul>
With this mapping, we'll also definitely need the Canary system
completing for the trunk builds.<br>
<br>
I'm currently not specifying repository names as I'm just about to
start discussions with the l10n folks about how to structure the
repos, which I think will help shape what we need to go with.<br>
<br>
Feedback and thoughts welcome.<br>
<br>
Mark.<br>
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