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Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Expected Soon (MozillaZine)
MozillaZine
covers an ongoing debate over the Mozilla Application Suite.
"The Mozilla Foundation is expected to make a formal announcement on the future of the Mozilla Application Suite soon. Debate about the future of the suite, often known as Mozilla 1.x or by its SeaMonkey codename, has raged over the last few days following Saturday's publication of the minutes of the mozilla.org staff meeting held on Monday 28th February 2005. In reference to Mozilla 1.8 final, the minutes state that it was "To be discussed tomorrow [Tuesday 1st March] whether we do one". This led to dozens of replies about the fate of the suite from a wide variety of contributors and onlookers."
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Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Posted Mar 11, 2005 0:56 UTC (Fri) by mlei (guest, #17766) [Link] This just in: there will be no Mozilla 1.8. See:
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Posted Mar 11, 2005 1:24 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] > This just in: there will be no Mozilla 1.8.
No completely right. There will be no release called "Mozilla 1.8" but our group that will take the lead in the new project development will very likely release what was expected to be released under that name. We don't know yet under which name and we don't know yet if it will bare the 1.8 or a different version number.
There _will_ very likely be a release of that application though.
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Posted Mar 11, 2005 3:17 UTC (Fri) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] What is the name of your group? Is it part of the Mozilla foundation?
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Posted Mar 11, 2005 14:36 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] We don't have a name yet, and we're not part of the Foundation (just a bunch of volunteers), though they provide us with tools and infrastructure, and we will be working closely together with them in a few regards.
We have some long-time Mozilla developers in our group, some people who do quite a lot of work on Gecko and core technologies, even a part-time Foundation employee (they pay him for work on Gecko though).
We're still in the process of really forming that new team though, so I can't tell you many details, but I try to get the word out as good as I can ;-)
Announcement is here Posted Mar 11, 2005 1:32 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] As reported at mozillaZine, the announcement is here: A transition plan was published that says how the project will transition to be managed by a group of volunteers instead of Mozilla Foundation: "The Mozilla Foundation will provide infrastructure support (CVS access, bugzilla, development tools, etc) for community members who wish to continue to develop Seamonkey. This community group may wish to do formal releases of Seamonkey, much as the Sunbird and Minimo developers do. We support this. We probably won't use the same naming conventions, as we need to be clear that this is not a Mozilla Foundation product release." See also mitchell's blog (one of the Mozilla Foundation heads) and Asa's blog (head QA of Mozilla Foundation). We, the volunteer group around the current suite, will try to make a good future and releases of this appliciation. You can be sure of that. The transition plans gives us the possibility to do so.
Confused... Posted Mar 11, 2005 5:02 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link] My understanding was that the Mozilla suite served as a testbed for developing the core technologies (Gecko, etc). Is this accurate? If so, is it this new group that will take over these core technologies? If not, how will the core team perform its testing? Or are we saying that Firefox directly will be the test bed?
Seems a little chaotic right now...but I guess if we all wanted stale boring and predictable we'd use IE.
Confused... Posted Mar 11, 2005 14:32 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] We're not taking over core technologies, that's still the Mozilla Foundation's thing. What they will use as a testbed, well I don't know and don't care too much, it's their problem.
Our group will take over development of the suite front end. The back end is still the core technologies used together with the other projects. Actually, one of our goals is to even share more technologies as we do currently. And we want to stay at the edge of core developemtn, i.e. CVS trunk.
You're sure correct that it's a little chaotic right now. The new project's core development team and leader have not yet settled, we have to work that and some other stuff out. But we're glad the Mozilla Foundation supports our plans to keep the suite alive, even if they don't do it theirselves (but that had basically been planned for a long time now).
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Expected Soon (MozillaZine) Posted Mar 11, 2005 3:32 UTC (Fri) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link] I've used Mozilla, and then Firefox, exclusively pretty much from day one (i.e., early betas). I drop in fairly regularly on Mozillazine, the forums, etc., as well as the main site. I poke around in Bugzilla. I read almost every Mozilla/Firefox/etc. related piece of news that comes out.
I do have one burning question right now, though: What the hell is going on?
Peter Yellman
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Expected Soon (MozillaZine) Posted Mar 11, 2005 5:09 UTC (Fri) by simon_kitching (guest, #4874) [Link] It seems pretty obvious to me.
The mozilla foundation has always developed:
A group decided to experiment by creating separate UIs for a+b (firefox) and a+c (thunderbird). This experiment has worked. The mozilla foundation decided it didn't have enough resources to maintain seamonkey + firefox + thunderbird, so had to drop further work on thunderbird.
Mozilla are still going to be maintaining a,b and c in the future in addition to the new firefox and thunderbird UIs. And they are going to provide security fixes for the existing Mozilla 1.7 for at least a couple of years. As there is nothing at all wrong with the existing Mozilla release this should keep current users happy. I'm a user of the suite at the moment, and am perfectly happy that I have a couple of years to decide what tool I will move to.
A group of volunteers have declared themselves willing to fork and improve item d (seamonkey) which is great. And Mozilla is going out of its way to make it easy for the new volunteer group to do so. However as the Mozilla Foundation isn't going to be doing QA or PR for this piece of software (due to lack of resources) the new product can't use the Mozilla foundation name; otherwise Mozilla could find itself being blamed for things it had nothing to do with. And simply asking these volunteers to join the core Mozilla team and continue Seamonkey as a mozilla tool isn't viable because this volunteer team might create and maintain the new release well - or not: if they don't, then Mozilla will cop the blame, and possibly have to divert people from elsewhere to save their reputation.
Separating the pieces of the old Mozilla Suite should provide a number of benefits:
Of course not everyone will be thrilled by this, but if the Mozilla Foundation just doesn't have enough cash to fund firefox + thunderbird + seamonkey, then what are they to do?
And besides, it may well be that in three years time, everyone will be perfectly happy with separate components, and wondering why people ever wanted a suite in the first place.
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Expected Soon (MozillaZine) Posted Mar 11, 2005 5:11 UTC (Fri) by simon_kitching (guest, #4874) [Link] oops. For"so had to drop further work on thunderbird." please read: "so had to drop further work on seamonkey."
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Expected Soon (MozillaZine) Posted Mar 11, 2005 13:41 UTC (Fri) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] The status quo has been that whenever a new or improved version of Gecko is ready it has been released as part of Seamonkey and then later integrated into Firefox.
Reading between the lines, does this mean that now we'll have separate, standalone releases of Gecko? Mozilla Gecko Library 1.8.0? I would love to see a single version of gecko on my machine instead of the two or three I have now (one for Firefox, one for Epiphany, one for Galeon).
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Expected Soon (MozillaZine) Posted Mar 11, 2005 14:44 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] Using "one Gecko to rule them all" is planned in what's currently code-named "XULRunner" and "LibXUL", and that is part of the plans being code-named as "Mozilla 2.0" (talking about the platform here, not an application called "Mozilla").
See MozillaWiki for details about those plans.
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Expected Soon (MozillaZine) Posted Mar 11, 2005 14:41 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] You're right in almost all you're saying, though one thing is not really correct: We do _not_ fork. In fact, this is what we try to avoid. And it seems doable quite well due to the modular design of the whole mozilla.org codebase.
We'll still sit in their CVS, and we want to stay on trunk (CVS HEAD) for our development (releases will be done from branches, ideally we'll branch together with Firfox/Thunderbird and release from a very similar if not the same set of core technologies code).
Announcement of Future of Mozilla Application Suite Expected Soon (MozillaZine) Posted Mar 12, 2005 15:41 UTC (Sat) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link] Yes, thanks for that list. I understand that is part of the "plan". I definitely have favored the transition you describe, and have wished that it would move right along. I've been concerned about the dilution of resources to the detriment of Firefox/Thunderbird for some time.
My comment, however, was made in the context of the earlier dustup about the (purported) lack of resources devoted to Firefox development. So, in a short space of time I learned that (1) MoFO was not devoting enough resources to Firefox to keep development moving along at a good pace, and (2) that MoFo was preparing to finally terminate development of the Suite. The obvious question that popped into my mind was "well, what are they doing, then -- what is the future, where are MoFos resources being/going to be applied?", or to put it another way "What the hell is going on?"
Peter Yellman
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