On 05/12/2015 09:02, Daniel Glazman wrote:
On 04/12/2015 20:43, R Kent James wrote:
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.
This has always been one of the major issues of the community:
"everything is in bug ###" is not enough as a message for us embedders
and users. And there were no blog post about any plan. There are
"desires", "opinions" but where's the plan? When was it discussed or at
least presented to us embedders? When was the impact on us evaluated and
how since we were never pinged about it? This does not feel like the
normal behaviour of a community, and it costs me an arm to write it, as
we say in french.
There was a discussion started on this at the last work week. As part of
that discussion, there was then at least a couple of follow-up
discussions on the Firefox-dev mailing list:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-July/003063.html
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-July/003119.html
I don't think it made it to any blog posts, but I could be wrong. Given
there's no firm plans on timescales or how things would be
removed/replaced, I think that's reasonable.
Note that for add-ons dropping xul etc has been already communicated as
part of other plans:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/
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.
One of the things that stuck out for me from the discussions we had, was
that we don't really know how hard moving away from XUL will be -
there's various performance concerns, if things can be done in HTML or
not, and many other things. We'll need to work to resolve these, but
there's currently too many unknowns to be able to scope/estimate the
project. The initial idea, as Gijs commented, was to try and start
moving various parts of Firefox and see what the real issues actually were.
Mark.
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