11
Oct 10

Lightning 1.0b3 Release Planning

As you may have noticed, that blog posts are not as common as they were before. This doesn’t mean that development has slowed down, but as you may remember, Simon has reduced his work on the project to an absolute minimum, due to job and real life restrictions.

Nevertheless, we are working as hard as we can to get the next release out of the door. If you are currently testing a 1.9.2 branch nightly (labeled as 1.0b3pre), you will not have noticed any improvements over 1.0b2 yet. Our current work has happened on comm-central (labeled 1.1a1pre, this is not the final version number though), which uses the latest version of the Mozilla Platform. Mozilla has done loads of changes to the platform with far-reaching consequences for the Calendar Project. We’ve decided to follow these issues to reduce the work needed later on.

We’ve also been working on lots of new features and bugfixes though and will be porting our fixes to the 1.9.2 branch very soon. If you’d like to see the list of fixes beforehand, check out this link.

We haven’t decided on a firm release date yet, but our goal is to release 1.0b3 towards the end of the year. Currently, there are 22 bugs left to fix for the release. 6 of them are in review and I’m confident that we’ll be able to fix the others soon.

But what can you do to help us towards the release? Yes, exactly! Testing! There is no way we can make a stable release without the help of our testing community. If you’d like to help out, you have two options:

  • Testing for adventurers: You’re up for a challenge? You make regular backups of your calendar data? Then this is for you! You’ll need the latest nightly of Thunderbird from comm-central, together with the latest nightly of Lightning from comm-central. Be sure to create a full backup of your Profile.
  • Testing with some safety ropes: You’d like some safety? Maybe you don’t want to upgrade your Thunderbird just yet? Thats fine too, but you’ll have to bear with us! Use your stock Thunderbird 3.1 together with a nightly version of Lightning from comm-1.9.2. Currently, this version doesn’t bring much advantage over the 1.0b2 release, but we will soon be porting patches so that you can take advantage of the new fixes. Note you should be backing up your profile in this case too, but its a lot less likely that something will break.

In any case, be sure to check out the Lightning Nightly Updater Extension to make sure you’re getting the newest testing version(s) on a daily basis

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Thank you for your help and remember: We can’t do it without you!