Mozilla Calendar Project Blog Its about time for some news…

After reading about Thunderbird getting a new Try Server, I thought it would be nice if the same would be possible for Lightning. After just a few failed builds, I successfully built Lightning using the Try Server and had a lightning.xpi uploaded to the right target directory.

If you want to try this on your own, you need a hg account and this patch file. Note also that you should be using mercurial queues. This not only makes managing multiple patches easier, it also makes using the Try Server a piece of cake.

1. Set up your ~/.hgrc. This is not strictly needed, but makes life easier. Add the following lines:

   [alias]
   push-to-try = push -f ssh://hg.mozilla.org/try-comm-central

   This will allow you to simply start a try build by calling hg push-to-try

2. Get the calendar tryserver patch and import it into your mercurial queue.

   hg qimport -n tryserver-calendar.diff https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=471566

3. Apply (with hg qpush) any amount of patches that you’d like to test.
4. Call hg push-to-try (yes, with all those patches applied to your tree!)

Thats all! If you want to watch your progress, see the Thunderbird Try Tinderbox. You will get email when your builds have completed, together with a link to the ready built lightning.xpi. Thunderbird files will not be uploaded.

For more information on the Tryserver, especially on how to exclude certain platforms or provide extra mozconfig options, please read the Thunderbird TryServer Guide or the Firefox TryServer Guide.

Six month ago, I shared our usage statistics for Lightning with you, which showed that Lightning users on Thunderbird 3.x had surpassed Lightning users on Thunderbird 2.x for the first time.

Now it’s time to look at things again and I’m happy to report, that as of yesterday roughly 75% of our users now use a Thunderbird 3.x build as can be seen in the chart below.

It’s also important to note that nearly 60% are already using the latest Thunderbird 3.1.x builds, while users of the old Thunderbird 3.0.x series are decreasing fast. This is mostly due to the major update offers of Mozilla Messaging for users of Thunderbird 3.0.x.

Major update offers have recently (last week) also started for users of Thunderbird 2.x, but haven’t really been unthrottled yet (throttling means, that currently only 1 in 5 users of TB2 gets a major update offer to Thunderbird 3.1.x). Once major update offers go out to every TB2 user, we expect their numbers to decrease much more heavily. The current state of things (showing the last six months) can be seen in the chart below:

As frequently noted in earlier articles, the ratio of Thunderbird 3.0.x and TB 3.1.x users is much higher on the weekends compared to the Thunderbird 2 users. The graphs show that very well.

For those interested: The “other” number contains users on older Thunderbird 1.5.x builds, SeaMonkey users and users, who have mistakenly tried to install Lightning into Firefox. Generally that number always fluctuates between 0.35% and 0.5% of our total active users.

I hope that you will find this as interesting as I do.