Releasing is hard

You might have noticed some delay in releasing Sunbird 0.3a1. There were some problems on the road, like lack of time, the tree being broken at the wrong moment, cvs acting weird, last-minute bugs etc. But it’s done now. Builds are up at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/sunbird/releases/0.3a1/, there are release notes and there even is a cvs tag (SUNBIRD_0_3a1_RELEASE)
Of course this is still an alpha build. There are problems, lots of them. We know about that. But we also have more changes ahead, and didn’t want to delay the release any further. Please take that into account when testing and using 0.3a1.
The biggest change since 0.2 is a complete rewrite of the backend. It is now possible to plug in new calendar providers (code that stores the calendar data in some file or database). We already have an ICS provider, a SQLite provider, and the beginnings of a CalDAV provider, and we expect others will come with time (let us know if you want to implement one). Writing a new backend isn’t easy, so it took some time. But we think it was worth it. It gives the possibilty to do real cool things.
The upcoming changes include a rewrite of the calendar views, improved performance, backend improvements and much more. Stay tuned!

9 comments

  1. Hello,
    congratulation to the english release of sunbird 0.3a1.
    The german team has released the german localization build based on the english release.
    It can be downloaded on our website http://www.sunbird-kalender.de
    Thanks
    Thorsten

  2. Glad to hear that. Will be heavily tested on me ;)

  3. Good news, indeed. And my hat off to your efforts!

  4. Congrats on the release!
    I would really like to help you guys and test Calendar coupled with Thunderbird, since it is how I would use it on a daily basis.
    However, I am not sure I can do that just yet.
    Here is why:
    – I use Thunderbird for work and personal email, and I cannot afford to lose data, so I stick to stable releases (i.e. 1.0.7).
    – That being the case, I would be more than willing to use and install Calendar on top of it, even if it is still alpha and buggy — as long as it does not cause problems with Thunderbird itself.
    Are there any plans to release a new XPI for Thunderbird in the near future? The latest one seem to be dated from January.
    I know releasing is hard! — but speaking as a user, it would open the doors to a lot more testers such as myself.
    Thanks and keep up the good work!

  5. Mozilla Sunbird

    E’ stata annunciata ieri la nuova versione di SunBird il software che andrà a sostituire il vecchio progetto Calendar di Mozilla.
    Secondo la stessa ammissione degli sviluppatori il programma è ben lungi da essere considerato anche solo beta,…

  6. By your accounts it’s been a bit of a hard slog, but thanks to all involved.
    Is it possible there’ll be a release of SB0.3a2 after the release of TB1.5 (to get it in front of a few more eyeballs) or does it already depend on new trunk featues?

  7. Andy,
    I don’t think that we’ll release Sunbird 0.3 alpha2 that fast. As you can see from our roadmap we plan to move to the new view code from Lightning and it will definitely take some time to get this code as stable and as functional as in Sunbird 0.3 alpha1.

  8. >We already have an ICS provider
    Does this mean that calendars can be stored in .ics files instead of SQLite database? Seems like there is no such feature in this release :(

  9. Serzh,
    If you really want, you can store your files in the .ics format by creating new ‘remote’ calendars, but giving them URLs that start with file:// instead of the normal http://. Keep in mind, however, that there are strong advantages to using the sqlite database, it’s much faster. You can always then use the ‘Publish’ or ‘Export’ options if you need an .ics copy of the data.