On 12/4/2015 8:48 AM, Douglas Turner wrote:
If there is a plan, please reference it! I guess what I am thinking here is that there is a difference between writing new stuff using html5 and rewriting all of Firefox to remove XUL.
I think that you are seeing what is the common experience of people who are trying to work with Mozilla technologies. That is, there are rumors and statements about plans to deprecate some feature or technology, but rarely any concrete schedule. Often these things take years between rumor and implementation, and the rumor starts before there is any concrete replacement. But the rumor is enough for us to be on notice, or so the expectation goes, so someone can get the urge to really make it happen, and quite quickly the rumor becomes reality. If you are trying to rely on Mozilla technologies, there is this constant threat of a sudden technology change that will leave you and your major application unusable.
What this does is leave people with the solid understanding that Mozilla is not a reliable technology partner.
As far as I understand the official Mozilla position, the only application that is encouraged to use the Mozilla platform is Firefox. Anybody else is on notice that their needs will not be considered in future technology planning, and "Go Fast" initiatives mean that technology deprecation will go faster than anybody can reasonably keep up with. In that environment it would be great if there were "no earlier than" schedules for deprecation of key technologies like XUL, XPCOM, and XBL, hopefully with years of warning.
I think it is fair to say that those of us who have major investments in Mozilla technology do not think this is the right approach for Mozilla. Of course we are terribly inconvenienced by it, to the point of existential threats to our existence as viable products and communities. But beyond that, many of us are loyal Mozillians who are not excited about being driven to things like NodeJS to get any real work done. Today's inconveniences like Thunderbird could be tomorrow's web innovation. Just look how AJAX and XHR originally arose as attempts to make better email clients in GMail and Outlook. Yet we are pushed away and isolated, so that Firefox can "Go Fast".
Another restatement of my current understanding of the Mozilla position is, "We will try to be nice about it, but please everybody but Firefox stop using the Mozilla platform as rapidly as possible". As loyal Mozillians, we'll fall on our swords and strongly consider migrating to NodeJS-based platforms. Is that really what Mozilla wants?
:rkent (representing his own viewpoints and not the Thunderbird Council). _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
