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<p>Here's my personal understanding/guess of where we are likely
heading with each of the 4 major pieces of Thunderbird. What's new
here is mostly discussing the "other" pieces beyond email, as most
of the Thunderbird++ discussion so far has implicitly focused on
email. Note in all cases, it may be possible to incorporate
portions of the new work in the existing Thunderbird, but that is
not a primary goal. Retaining existing users IS a primary goal.<br>
</p>
<p><b>Mail (and related views)</b>: There will be a servo-like
rewrite of the major email portions (accounts, servers, folders,
messages, views) using web technologies. This will likely be
mostly driven by a paid team.</p>
<p><b>Contacts</b>: will be a complete rewrite in web technologies.
I am working toward figuring out how the Cardbook, vContacts, and
my group (Caspia) can work together on this. It is likely this
will be done mostly by volunteers.<br>
</p>
<p><b>Calendar</b>: will likely be a line-by-line conversion from
XUL and the Mozilla Platform to web technologies. I have another
Caspia team that might work on this, but the overall task is
probably too big for them alone.</p>
<p><b>Chat</b>: I have heard nothing from this team, but I would
guess this is also likely a line-by-line conversion from XUL and
the Mozilla Platform to web technologies.</p>
<p>It would be good to hear from the Chat and Calendar teams about
possibilities for those subsystems, so far I am guessing. I am
also introducing here the idea that the "rewrite from scratch"
proposal is I believe mostly focused on email only, which might be
worthy of discussion.<br>
</p>
<p>:rkent<br>
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