----- Pôvodná správa -----
Predmet: Re: [Maildev] Integrating popular and useful extensions into TB
Od: Jonathan Kamens jik@kamens.us
Pre: ace acelists@atlas.sk, Thunderbird email developers
maildev@lists.thunderbird.net
Dátum: Sat, 9 Dec 2017 16:36:20 -0500

Well, it seems integrating the addons was just a proposal to save the
addon code (which users do use) for those where the authors are
absent/inactive. This wouldn't be necessary if addon authors did they
job and observed Firefox/toolkit changes and maintained their addons.
Notice if the addons were for Firefox, all the
idle/unmaintained/not-rewritten-for-webextensions ones would be dead by
now and nobody would talk about saving them or integrating them.

I do not understand the uproar and requests from addons authors towards
the TB developers to create lists and solutions for changes in
Firefox/Toolkit (!) when this information is readily available on the
Mozilla wiki and has Firefox teams behind it maintaining it
(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases).

So no, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. If you maintain your
addon properly and it does work in TB59 (except bug 1414398), then there
is no need to integrate your addon and it will be scratched from the
list. Then you do not even need to observe this discussion anymore as it
does not apply to you.

Thanks.

aceman

On 12/9/17 5:56 PM, ace wrote:

Yes, it's sort of obvious that many of the people on the Thunderbird
development team do not understand add-on maintainers well.

The vast majority -- and I mean the VAST majority -- of information in
the Firefox release notes is entirely irrelevant to Thunderbird add-on
maintainers.

Expecting Thunderbird add-on maintainers who do not understand the
Firefox code base to be able to wade through those release notes to pick
out the tiny bits of them that may be relevant to them is incredibly
unreasonable.

Not to mention the fact that as Thunderbird and Firefox diverge, the
Firefox release notes may not even be accurate for Thunderbird.

See my previous message to Ben. I am giving you the perspective of an
add-on maintainer here. You can listen to what I am saying and perhaps
learn something useful from it, or you can tell me I'm "wrong" for not
agreeing with you about what my "job" is as an add-on maintainer.

One of those paths is likely to encourage more people to create and
maintain add-ons, the other one isn't. Which is which, I leave as an
exercise to the reader.

I think I'm probably all done with this conversation. I've said my
piece. Do what you will with it.

  jik

----- Pôvodná správa -----
Predmet: Re: [Maildev] Integrating popular and useful extensions into TB
Od: Jonathan Kamens jik@kamens.us
Pre: ace acelists@atlas.sk, Thunderbird email developers
maildev@lists.thunderbird.net
Dátum: Sat, 9 Dec 2017 18:15:16 -0500

The VAST majority of the changes is done in Firefox code, see
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Add-ons_Guide_57 . All of the
linked information (on the Firefox page for developers) is relevant to
addon authors. Unless they have a binary or Webextension addon, none of
which work on TB.

I'd expect any programmer with a chunk of code he maintains can grep
through it to see if he incidentally uses any of the interfaces or
objects clearly listed on the Firefox page. The addon authors use the
common Firefox AND Thunderbird-specific interfaces. Ignoring the vast
majority of the changing codebase (Firefox) is unreasonable.

Yes and they diverge in a way that allows addon author to do less changes.

I try to listen and understand. I just do not understand the logic. A
proposal was done to authors NOT maintaining their addons (OK some of
the addons listed are maintained, but that needs to be determined for
each one in a latter phase of the task). You object to the proposal even
though you seem not to be in the target group (you responded and told us
you do not needed it). So what is the point?

Yes, but encouraging people to create more addons that they then leave
behind and expect to work unchanged for 10 years by ignoring all news is
also no help to anybody.

Thanks that you have the manpower to maintain your addon (we don't) and
we can enjoy it on TB 59.

aceman

Hey all,

I think I'm caught up enough, trying to read through all of this thread
this evening. Here is my take: Jonathan is concerned about two things,
our ability to roll popular extensions into mainline Thunderbird and the
lack of good, solid, up-to-date documentation surrounding add-ons.

I think we, as a community, should try and be open to Jonathan's
feedback (and all feedback we get from add-on authors). What he's saying
is something we all know (hopefully), and that is that Thunderbird is
not the easiest platform to target at the moment.

What I propose: I'm looking at doing an add-on authors tour and talk
about what can be done to improve their lives. Jonathan, if I could
speak with you on IRC or in a chat of our own and put together some
changes you'd like to see - that would be great. Some kind of mailing
list and maintained documentation (I can oversee this) on breaking
changes that are Thunderbird specific and in a place everyone knows
about would be great. I'll see what I can do.

Finally, something that we need to start being aware of. We, as
maintainers, Thunderbird core developers and team won't always get the
feedback we want, or comments that we completely understand. Our
knee-jerk reaction needs to be trying to understand what is behind the
feedback. If someone says they wish Thunderbird was more like Outlook or
that our documentation sucks - our reaction should be "Why do you think
that? What do you think some options are to improve this?"

This isn't the first bit of feedback we've heard from add-on authors in
regards to Thunderbird being difficult to target, we can do better on
this and I'll solicit some feedback from add-on authors in the form of a
survey next week on how we can improve. Also, I think we should do a
couple of hangouts/chats to continue getting ideas from those writing
add-ons on what we can do to make life easier.

We're all on the same team, we're all working on an awesome project
together. Let's make an effort to understand each other.

Ryan Sipes
Thunderbird Community Manager

On 12/9/17 5:07 PM, ace wrote:

On 10/12/2017 05:49, Ryan Sipes wrote:

I think we should create a team of volunteers under the guidance of
developers to (perhaps unofficially) adopt/fix/nurture add-ons. It takes
30 minutes per add-on to implement the changes described on
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Add-ons_Guide_57.

The C/M could manage the establishment of such a group.

I've fixed very few myself and fed the changes back to the authors, who
have all picked them up, apart from Kaosmos, author of very popular
add-ons, like ImportExportTools (see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424518), Profile Switcher
(I fixed, http://www.jorgk.com/misc/addons58/) and HeaderToolsLite
(broken due to nsILocalFile).

Jörg.

On 10/12/2017 10:54, Jörg Knobloch wrote:

Fixed ImportExportTools, available at http://www.jorgk.com/misc/addons58/

Jörg.