Ideas for how you could get me to contribute to Thunderbird

[mozkewisch (Philipp Kewisch)]

@jerrac

Things like:

• Syntax highlighting
• Easy to find list of branches. (I had to look very carefully to find the link to the branches.)
• Better UI. ( I just opened up the same file on both github and hg.mozilla.org, github is way easier on the eyes.)

Hmm… Looking at all the features I found in 5 minutes on hg.mozilla.org vs. what’s on GitHub, for code browsing, they’re pretty much the same. Github is just easier to use.

You might want to look at https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source which is much nicer for code search. It has syntax highlighting and better UI. The branches thing is a bit different than you’d expect. hg branches are not quite the same as git branches. Mozilla chose to go with different (related) repositories for beta vs nightly. There is http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ for the nightly builds, and http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta for beta, and http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr52 for the ESR 52 which is the last major release.

@jerrac

Is there any kind of equivalent to the pull request? I have not done a lot of collaborative work, but the few times I’ve used a pull request, the ability to comment on specific code in the request and just general comments was very very useful.

Mozilla is experimenting with phabricator, which would allow per-line comments. Here is an example: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D387

@jerrac

@mozkewisch

Would you be interested in diving in to the website code to also fix the issue you filed?

I was thinking of doing so. I guess I’ll go see how hard it is to build a local dev instance of the site.

Great!

@jerrac

@mozkewisch

Thunderbird’s current stance on the future is here …

Yep, read it way back when you first posted it. It was still good to read it again. Though, this line:

… but Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure …

I think is why I didn’t think to find Thunderbird still living alongside all of Mozilla’s stuff.

Thunderbird is very intertwined with Mozilla Corporation’s infrastructure. We generally want to move off of anything that incurs an additional maintenance effort on MoCo’s side to support Thunderbird. This is a gradual process. We’re making careful decisions on what to migrate in what order given the resources we have. hg and Bugzilla might be one of the last services we move off of.