In the spirit of Twitter I will keep this blog post down to 140 characters. Check out @mozcalendar for more frequent updates on the project.
In the spirit of Twitter I will keep this blog post down to 140 characters. Check out @mozcalendar for more frequent updates on the project.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015 at 12:39 am and is filed under Project Updates. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
The ‘releases’ have to be more frequent. Too many times does a new release come out for the email client like thunderbird or seamonkey email and breaks lightning, and while there are usually ‘beta’ versions available that fix whatever broke in order to restore functionality to the latest version out, too often does lightning stay at a version that no longer works with the latest version of thunderbird or seamonkey that has arrived. It is fairly safe to assume that most will have the new version of thunderbird or seamonkey since most installs will auto update the application. So to not update lightning in a relative short time after an update to those apps has been available is essentially helping to cause lightning to fail and or not work. It doesn’t make much sense to still have lightning at version 3.3.3 knowing that for the majority of updated apps out there, it doesn’t quite work as it should.
We are doing releases just as often as Thunderbird, which follows the Firefox ESR cycle. This means new major releases every 42 weeks and beta releases every 6 weeks. While it is true that the beta versions are sometimes released a day or two after the Thunderbird beta, I make the best effort to keep the time low. Sometimes, the new Lightning beta is out even before the Thunderbird beta. For major releases like Lightning 2.6 or 3.3 we make sure together with the Thunderbird team that Lightning is available before the majority of users is updated. Lightning 3.3.3 is compatible to the latest Thunderbird release, which is Thunderbird 31. It has been this way for almost 42 weeks.
Unfortunately, Seamonkey does major releases about every 6 weeks. We used to be at a cycle like this, but it really meant that one in every 6 weeks I was busy with nothing other than release engineering and support. As for some reason there are always some installations that do not auto-update, the support volume was really hard to handle and mostly consisted of messages like “please check for updates…again” because a matching Lightning version has already been released.
Switching to the 42 week cycle has lowered the number of complaints, the volume was surprisingly low even for the major Lightning 3.3 release. For Seamonkey this means that Lightning users will have to continue using beta releases until they also change their cycle. For me this means I have more time to work on bugfixes, new features next to my main job.
To alleviate this in the future, we are planning to integrate Lightning into Thunderbird, so that there is always a compatible version packaged with Thunderbird. Given there have been some complications I am not yet sure it can be done for Thunderbird 38, but we are working on it.
If you have any questions please let me know :)
On Linux with TB 38.0b4 and Lightning 4.0b3, it seems like the dialog for changing calendar color stucks when trying to change a calendar’s color.
Can you enable the Lightning 4.0 release on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/lightning/ ?
The developer there said “Thunderbird 38 is not officially released yet”, yet the official Thunderbird download page already has 38.0.1 on it (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/). I have 38.0.1, but can’t use Lightning, because I’m on Arch Linux and they didn’t include it in the installer, and I can’t install it from the Addons page!
Yes, the website was made public a bit too early. We haven’t actually enabled automatic updates for Thunderbird though, and there have been some misconceptions about the actual release date. That said, by now I’ve managed to make Lightning 4.0.0.1 public, which will work with ArchLinux. I’ve also discussed the further process with the ArchLinux maintainer.