Getting Thunderbird 3 out the doorAugust 18th, 2009
Last week some of the Thunderbird drivers got together and had a discussion about Thunderbird 3 and the possibilities for future versions.
Up until now we’ve been very focussed on the features that we want to get into Thunderbird 3. We have realised that this is now becoming the wrong approach - Thunderbird 2 was released a long time ago - based on the Gecko 1.8.1 code base (we’re now on Gecko 1.9.1). We know from feedback that the Thunderbird 3 builds are much more stable and improved over the Thunderbird 2 builds - it is now time to get Thunderbird 3 to users.
Therefore we are looking at shipping Thunderbird 3 as soon as possible. This will mean that we won’t have time to fit everything into Thunderbird 3 that we would like to get in. What we have decided do is to release Thunderbird 3 and then look to have another version in a short period of time following that. The important items that don’t make Thunderbird 3 will be high priority for Thunderbird 3.next.
For the blocking lists, this means we’re currently reducing the size of the list by about half - some of the bugs have already been updated and we are working on the rest.
For future Thunderbird development, we are moving to a more agile development process. We need to move to development cycles with shorter iterations to encourage faster evolution of the user experience, as well as to alleviate pressure to land features before they’re ready. As part of this we will be experimenting with new features/development via extensions and then landing in the extensions within the main Thunderbird code base. This has a couple of advantages - we can ship versions of Thunderbird without being dependent on the state of partially completed features, and by using extensions we’ll know the extension points are available for extensions developers to use.
http://ccgi.standard8.plus.com/blog/archives/242