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On 10/20/2015 6:14 PM, jsabash wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:5626E6FE.3080308@bellatlantic.net" type="cite">
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<font face="Arial">"Investigated Github atom/electron as a
development environment for a post-Gecko Thunderbird.<br>
It would be really good to have some partners in long-term work
for Thunderbird.<br>
Gecko Thunderbird is dying, is there any debate about that?"<br>
<br>
I would like a little clarification on this statement.<br>
Gecko to me is the basic rendering engine of a browser or Mail
App<br>
</font><br>
</blockquote>
<br>
At the meetings, I tend to raise difficult issues that are not
easily expressed as a two-sentence summary. Let me clarify.<br>
<br>
Gecko development is currently tightly focused on improving Firefox
as a product. Mozilla as an organization has defined its mission as
promoting "the Web" which seems to mean the HTML/CSS/JavaScript
development platform. Neither of these goals is compatible with the
current Thunderbird development environment, which is essentially
recompiling Firefox to function as an email client. We also need to
realize that Firefox is under tremendous pressure right now, so they
have precious little bandwidth to focus on anything other than their
own long-term relevance. We can neither demand nor expect that
Firefox revenue will be used to subsidize Thunderbird development,
either directly or even indirectly as now.<br>
<br>
A good example is the discussion we recently had about how addon
changes will affect Thunderbird. Blake Winton (who is a key player
now in the Web Extensions world) said "It isn't being designed to
work with Thunderbird, and I'm not even sure they would accept
patches that got it working with Thunderbird". We can expect more
and more changes like this in the future, with things like XUL
deprecation, Electrolysis, and Servo in the Firefox world leading to
an increasingly difficult operating environment for Thunderbird in
the Gecko binary world.<br>
<br>
So it seems to me that long-term we have these three long-term
choices:<br>
<br>
1) Assume that either Firefox is bluffing about their upcoming
changes, or imagine that somehow we can adapt to them, even when the
Firefox team itself has no long-term commitment to continue to
support Thunderbird as a application target for a Gecko binary.<br>
<br>
2) Fork mozilla-central at some future point when Thunderbird
support becomes untenable, and try to maintain it ourselves.<br>
<br>
3) Rework Thunderbird to work on an alternate development
platform that has a long-term future.<br>
<br>
The current "plan" is path 1) which IMHO is really path 2). I do not
believe that is a viable long-term plan. I laid out a plan in my
post "Thunderbird as a Web App" that essentially set down a
three-year timetable for a transition to an alternate platform that
used Web technologies.<br>
<br>
At the meeting, my point was that I do not sense other people having
the same sense of urgency and commitment to a long-term transition
that I seem to feel. I outlined some of my investigations into the
Atom/Electron development environment, which is a Github (the
company) project to make a development environment for desktop
applications that provides a platform for making Mac/Linux/Windows
apps that use nodejs as the backend. This is exactly where we seem
to be headed, so I think that we should experiment with that
platform. I switched this weekend to Atom as my editor to get some
feel for this (and discovered that it crashes several times per
day).<br>
<br>
The quote in the notes "Gecko Thunderbird is dying, is there any
debate about that?" is asking if anyone really believes that plan 1)
or plan 2) is the right long-term plan. If not, then we really need
to get more people to focus on the transition issues.<br>
<br>
:rkent<br>
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