Mozilla Calendar Project Blog Its about time for some news…

The Thunderbird 5 release is just around the corner so its about time to provide a release candidate for the Lightning extension for calendaring. The upcoming version of Lightning will be called 1.0b4 and will be compatible with Thunderbird 5.

Unfortunately, this round of testing will be very very very short. Thunderbird 5 is slated for this Tuesday, the 28th and its critical that we have our release ready for this date. To compensate for the short period, we will be ready to spin another release if something major is broken, so if you are reading this after the release, please do file bugs as quick as possible if you find some.

Candidate builds for Lightning 1.0 beta4 in 36 languages are available as of now for:

• Windows (32 bit)
• Linux (32/64 bit)
• Mac OS X (32/64 bit)

A corresponding build of the Provider for Google Calendar is also available at those locations.

Note you will need Thunderbird 5 (or a beta thereof) to try it out. You are encouraged to back up your profile before upgrading. To install these builds in Thunderbird 5, please follow these steps:

1. Download the build for your operating system to a folder on your hard disk.
   NOTE:Please make sure, that you right-click on the links above and choose “Save Link as…”. Otherwise Firefox will try to install Lightning and you will get an error message like “Lightning 1.0b4 could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox.”
2. Open Thunderbird, then open its add-on manager via Tools –> Add-ons (or the corresponding entry in your language)
3. Click on the Tools Icon, then select “Install Add-on from File…” and navigate to the lightning.xpi file that you just downloaded.
4. Restart Thunderbird after the add-on installation has been performed. Voila!

Remember, testing is very important. The earlier errors are found, the faster we can react and possibly post another release on short notice.

Please tell us what you think of these candidate builds and file bugs in Bugzilla as you go. Thank you very much for your support, we couldn’t do it without you!

As you may have noticed if you are running a Thunderbird 3.3 alpha or nightly, Lightning has changed its version number from 1.1a1pre to 1.0b4pre. I’d like to take a moment and explain why we changed this and what effects it may have.

As mentioned on the Calendar Versions page, we need to follow the release cycle of Thunderbird. Users will (and have, in the past) massively complain if a new version of Thunderbird is released without a corresponding Lightning version. Although there is no final plan yet when Thunderbird 3.3 will be released, the ballpark figure is some time in April. This would mean we have something between 3 and 7 weeks to complete our next release.

If we continue our previous plan and release Lightning 1.0b3, which would work on Thunderbird 3.1 and 3.2, we would have just enough time to complete that release and would need a near to equal amount of time to prepare for a Thunderbird 3.3 compatible release. As you can imagine, this is not feasible.

Therefore we have decided to leave out 1.0b3 and concentrate on releasing 1.0b4, which will be compatible with Thunderbird 3.3.

For localizers, this means they will have to make sure l10n-central is correctly translated. Resulting l10n builds can be found here. Pike is working hard to make sure the l10n dashboard can keep up with our branch switching. As soon as he is done, we can officially announce string freeze and accept sign-offs. This of course doesn’t mean you need to wait. We have checked in all bugs that require string changes, so go ahead and translate!

For Seamonkey, this means that Lightning 1.0b4 will support Seamonkey 2.1, which is currently in its beta phase.

In turn, we no longer have a need for 1.0b3pre nightly builds. This might be unfortunate for Thunderbird 3.1 users that want to stay up to date with the latest Lightning features. On the other hand, the list of bugs to be fixed for the next beta doesn’t contain any more new features. We will concentrate on fixing bugs and regressions to make sure Lightning 1.0b4 doesn’t cause any surprises for your daily work.

For those of you using a Thunderbird 3.3 Alpha version or later, we have great news! I have finally managed to fix bug 591744, which was the last of the many bugs that had to be fixed to recover from the major changes to the mozilla-central platform.

If you would like to give it a try, you will need either a nightly or alpha version of Thunderbird, together with the nightly version of Lightning. You can get these using the following links:

• Thunderbird 3.3a2 is available here
• Thunderbird 3.3a3pre nightly is available here
• Lightning 1.1a1pre* nightly is available here

Update: As noted in the comments below, the trunk versions of Lightning also work with the following beta versions of SeaMonkey:

• SeaMonkey 2.1b2: soon to be released — when it is, it will be announced on the SeaMonkey news page;
• SeaMonkey 2.1b3pre nightly (en-US) is available here
• SeaMonkey 2.1b3pre nightly (other languages) is available here

* To avoid misunderstandings, even though it is named 1.1a1pre, this does not mean we have release 1.0 yet! Lightning on trunk (labeled 1.1a1pre) uses a different Mozilla platform than Lightning from the 1.9.2 branch (labeled 1.0b3pre). We have chosen differing version numbers to make that difference obvious.

After a fair amount of duplicates (19 as of now!), we finally have the hardware set up so we can provide Linux 64 bit nightlys on Trunk. On a related note, we now provide mixed x86/mac64 nightlys for the Mac OSX Platform, in turn we have dropped support for PowerPC.

After Thunderbird started providing nightly 64 bit builds it was time to follow. Unfortunately, our Mac builder was a G5 with a PowerPC processor, which doesn’t support OSX 10.6. Thanks to Mozilla Messaging, we have now received a new mac and linux builder with 64 bit support.

Also I’d like to thank gozer from Mozilla Messaging for setting things up for us. Thanks to him, we now have the builders running comm-central (Thunderbird 3.3 Alpha compatible) builds.

You can get the new builds here, they are compatible with the current Thunderbird nightlys from comm-central:

• Linux 64 bit: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-central/linux64-xpi/
• MacOS: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-central/macosx-xpi/

If you are looking for Thunderbird 3.1.x compatible nightly builds, you can get them as usual from here.

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!

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.

The Calendar Project is proud to report, that (finally) the 1.0 beta2 release of Lightning has been completed and is now available via addons.mozilla.org.

About 6 months after 1.0b1, we have managed to complete 86 further bugfixes and improvements for the benefit of our users. Notable improvements for this release are:

• You can now print out your tasks
• Improved calendar view navigation, performance improved
• Better error handling when adding or subscribing to calendars
• Allow setting different start and end timezones for events and tasks
• CalDAV support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers have been improved
• Performance improvement and reduced network load when accessing certain CalDAV servers (webdav-sync specification)
• The application stability, performance and memory consumption have been improved

Lightning 1.0 beta2 is available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 35 different languages including English. Please read the release notes for Lightning 1.0 beta2 before downloading.

Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. We would not be able to do this without your assistance!