Comments on: Thunderbird & calendars

By: Andrew Savory

Andrew Savory — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:19:05 +0000

This really, really sucks.

I’m trying to get by with t-bird in a corporate setting, but honestly the lack of calendar is crippling me. I’ve got a half way solution using Apple’s iCal, but iCal really wants Mail.app for sending invitations and confirmations (maybe because of bugs like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472891 which make third-party mailers a risky dependency?)

I agree that tbird3 without calendar is not worth shipping. Damn.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:45 +0000

Honestly, I would delay it until it’s done, and if necessarily I would reduce the scope of what “done” means so that “until it’s done” doesn’t stretch off far into the distance. I don’t know what the plans on your road-map are, but honestly the other stuff I’ve seen about Tbird3 doesn’t give me any good reason to move up; UI changes are nice, autoconfiguration is nice, etc., but it’s all just “nice”. I have a deep, deep suspicion about Gloda because I don’t want to see large chunks of cached data in my user’s roaming profiles, so that’s probably going to be turned off, and aside from that I’m not sure there’s much else to talk about. Calendar, for me and I’m sure others, is the USP.

If calendar integration can really work, then great. At the moment, I’m sitting on Tbird 2 with Lightning 0.8 installed. Most times I start it up it tells me 0.9 is available: great, but I can’t actually install it because for some reason it’s incompatible and doesn’t work. Same with EnigMail. In my experience, the better integrated the extension, the more brittle it is, particularly with the UI hooks points via overlay – the Mozilla UI extension mechanism leaves me cold because it basically turns UI into API and any small change can throw stuff into a spin.

I think we both agree on how important the calendar is. I worry that being an extension necessarily metes out second-class treatment: e.g., you’re not going to hold back a security update if it breaks the calendar. You’re not going to spend time doing QA on it. You’re not going to ensure Tbird3 releases have working calendar from day one. (At least, if you are doing those things, there’s no point it being an extension). If we’ve learned anything from Linux, it’s that stuff “outside the tree” just rots. With a relatively part-time bunch of people on the calendar, I don’t see how it’s going to be any other way. I just don’t see what is going to make Tbird3 more compelling that Tbird2, because right now I don’t see any substantial difference.

By: David Ascher

David Ascher — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:04:59 +0000

All good points. One (annoying question: you say that a non-working calendar in Tb3 should be a release blocker. How long would you delay Tb3 by until the calendar capability was finished? 1 month? 3? 6? 12?

Note as well that while there certainly are challenges to maintenance of add-ons, the calendar team has shown that they can move that plugin along and make it better while the Thunderbird 2 codebase wasn’t evolving. In other words, decoupling the two makes it more likely, IMO, that we’ll end up with a good calendar integration and a good email client than if we delayed the release of the latter until the former was ready.

But yes, tough choices all around.