Saturday, January 2, 2010

Predicted work on Thunderbird

It's a new year, so it's time for me to predict (and probably overestimate, who knows) what I would like to do and see in the realm of Thunderbird (and SeaMonkey) and other tidbits in the Mozilla realm.

News submodule

Thunderbird 3 improved the filter story dramatically here; the next two biggest itches are the complete inanity that is news URIs (too many bugs to count), and the venerable old crossposts bug. I still contend that the latter would best be served by per-account database functionality; in any case, it does require some database changes to work properly. I doubt I'll find time to look at that bug in particular this year.

The URI issues are more tractable, but I don't think I'll find time to hit them for 3.1; in any case, I now consider them to be the highest priority news bugs. So, to anyone with time on their hands: feel free to take one or two of these and start fixing. You'll get much kudos from Thunderbird Usenet users.

Other various "nice-to-haves" on my list: fixing subscribe, cleaning up some of the gunk in the code, adding support for RFC 3977 CAPABILITIES, possibly changing how news:a.group URIs work (open the folder view, not necessarily subscribing to them), among others. Combine-and-decode also falls under this list, but it's a lot less tractable than some of the other stuff.

Analysis tools

jshydra could use some more love: I hope to be able to be able to get a converter to a more natural AST working by the end of the year, as well as an automated test suite to verify correctness whenever I change m-c versions. I've also been working on-and-off on getting symbols for DXR via MSVC, which should hopefully also be finished this year.

Other Mozilla/Mailnews work

As I've mentioned before, my biggest goal for 3.1 is to be able to specify new account types in Javascript. I basically have the necessary framework completed locally, I just need to finish writing the tests and fix some bugs before getting it reviewed and committed; after that, I'll be writing a series of blog entries on developing an account type in JS, similar to (and hopefully better than) my pork guides. Speaking of which, I hope to finish that sometime this year as well. Possibly during summer again.

I've yet to see a roadmap for the address book in 3.1 and later, so I don't know what I'll be doing for the address book in this upcoming year. I expect, though, that I won't do anything near the scale of what I did for bug 413260. De-RDF and de-morkification are another two things I'd like to see worked on that I don't expect to get to this next year as well.

Time to see how much I'll actually get done this year!

3 comments:

Soe said...

I´d really like to see pure Javascript account types. Do you have some early previews to play around with?

Joshua Cranmer said...

This hg repository contains one of my previously abandoned attempts (before I switched methodologies); the most complete of these is not publicly published--but I don't intend to do things in the same way any more.

This patch hunk is the reconversion of RSS C++ classes into pure JS, which probably technically counts as the first pure JS implementation.

Gordon P. Hemsley said...

It probably would have been helpful to link to the News URI meta bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108948