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Sync for Thunderbird

bugzilla.mozilla.org

39 pointsmariuz15 comments

The scoop: An issue opened 14 years ago with a patch that solves it.

Never merged. The issue is kept alive by people wanting the feature.

It sounds like within a year or so the underlying system was refactored enough that the patch couldn't be landed as-is, which makes sense. It's big enough that I can also imagine it being hard to get a review if only 1-2 people know the system well enough and don't find the time to review it... still quite unfortunate.

I run into this sort of situation with OSS a lot lately, for one PR I spent probably at least a dozen days total of my time just rebasing it over and over because a project with hundreds of contributors lands lots of commits every day.

I don't know your PR, but the way this is helped in corporate-land is with very small PRs and feature flags. Some maintainers are a lot more of a pain in the ass than others, though.

This is great when it works, but I'm personally not convinced that it works for every change. Some things are genuinely just big changes, and doing them piecemeal is (IMO) actually impractical. Granted, this is more likely to be true with refactoring then features or bugfixes.

All of which is not to say that it's not a preferred style when it does work. And as a policy choice it is perfectly reasonable to simply decree that the codebase will never be refactored at that scale.

Another alternative is to have code freezes, though that comes with its own sets of cons. But you just need them to be long enough to do the last rebase and merge, so in theory can be relatively short.

One of the chief issues preventing the merge at that time was that it was the era of maximum hostility of the Mozilla community to anything not named Firefox. Adding any code to support Thunderbird in the core codebase would have been at the mercy as to whether that module owner was nice or not.

This brings up an interesting point. It is my opinion that we're in the reverse now. Mozilla seems deadset on ruining Firefox's competitive advantages -- some through reasonable evolution (forcing new features on the community that only a small subset ask for) to user hostility (Firefox mobile redesign that dropped summer 2021, tanking its Android reviews after it dropped extension support [and for me, text scaling managed via about:config killed accessibility]).

While I can appreciate that there is funding to be found in password managers and VPN services, I'd much rather see Rust take over the world!

Rust taking over the world would bring Mozilla the same sort of income that "Java taking over the world" brought SUN. It's fundamentally irrelevant, in the great scheme of things, because monetising a programming language has always been very hard (and now all competitors are free, they've effectively been commoditised).

I don't think they're "ruining" FF; if anything they're again entirely focused on it after a decade spent in the wilderness throwing money at doomed efforts. But they seem somewhat lost on their actual mission, and make it very hard to like them. Mozilla is not about making a browser, nor it is a social-justice charity. It should be a beacon of public interest in the darkness of everyday commercialisation of the web. The browser should be a mean to that end, not the be-all of the company.

>if anything they're again entirely focused on it after a decade spent in the wilderness throwing money at doomed efforts

But what features have they really added lately? I looked over the the change logs over the last year and the only notable new features to the browser was a theme color wheel and adding search results (Ctrl + F) showing up on the scroll bar. It doesn't seem like they are innovating the browsing experience.

They're focusing on monetising the browser experience as a whole, with services like the VPN - not necessarily on pure browser features. It's still more than they were doing in the FFOS years.

They've dropped that password manager "Lockwise" faster than a google product.

Thank you for the explanation.

Submissions like this are when I wish HN didn't have the "original title" policy. It doesn't give you any context about a link and why someone should care about it.

Nothing stops OP to comment it.

Well, that doesn't help when you're trying to skim the front page headlines though. There are so many in a day that I don't have time to click into each one.

Many of them have very low information density, especially when they're just the name of some OSS project that's not famous.

"Sync for Thunderbird": My first thought was "that's still a thing?".

"Sync for Thunderbird: Open issue for 14 years" is more interesting and informative a title

Yeah, you are right. The art of naming things...

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