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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Jörg Knobloch wrote on 27.08.19 00:05:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:50ce1b85-6603-85ef-3f3b-578d62e676e4@jorgk.com"><br>
All add-ons suffer from constant breakages as many add-on authors
can confirm. What you call "ride-along" fixes, or lack thereof,
has killed off many add-ons.
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<p>For me, <b>that</b> is the important topic to discuss.</p>
<p>If there are mechanical, scripted or very simple ride-alone
changes that are applied to the whole code tree, then I think it
would be good for the TB project to apply these to the addons as
well. In fact, on addons.thunderbird.net, the Thunderbird project
already has the source code for all Open-Source addons available.
It would be technically possible to apply changes to all Open
Source addons, in one big swoop. The Open-Source license also
gives us the official right to do so. In fact, that's what
Open-Source is all about.<br>
</p>
<p>It would be a tremendous help for addon authors. More
importantly, it would help end users, because a lot more addons
would stay up to date and usable, thus helping our ecosystem and
directly helping our users to keep functionality that they loved
even in new versions of Thunderbird. It would also indirectly help
the Thunderbird project, because "addon XYZ doesn't work with the
new TB" is the primary reason why people don't update.</p>
<p>If you look at it from the user perspective, or from the overall
perspective, it makes sense to do it this way. What takes a
full-sweep change maybe 3 minutes per addon takes an addon author
hours, just to figure that something is wrong, why it's wrong, how
to fix it, and to make the release. The difference in overall time
spent is enormous.</p>
<p>Greetings,</p>
<p>Ben<br>
</p>
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