On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Daniel Glazman <[email protected]> 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.
>

I honestly can't understand how one can come to this conclusion from the
points above.

Giant corporations in our industry make plans in secret, announce them once
they are done and everyone is left scrambling to follow along (unless they
were participating in their NDA-bound developer programs), and yet most
people consider that business as usual.

Mozilla starts talking in public about future directions long before there
is even a concrete plan in place and some feel like there will be a "sudden
technology change". It can only be "sudden" if we are talking in geological
terms.

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?
>

Your frustration along with your long-time commitment to the project makes
it clear that you care deeply about this, but could you perhaps try to tell
us what it is we should do:

a) a blog post about a specific plan with a timeline, decided and delivered
from above, or
b) an honest discussion in public about our "desires" and "opinions" that
will culminate in a specific plan.

Both are reasonable requests and it's fine for different people to want
either, but I can't understand how someone could want both at the same time.

In case folks in this thread missed our previous discussions:

- firefox-dev thread from July 2015, titled "Revisiting how we build
Firefox":
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-July/003063.html

- dev-platform thread from October 2014, titled "Moratorium on new XUL
features":
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/HDJl1iBifB8/1TG876POw8cJ

That's how things usually happen at Mozilla, we discuss in public mailing
lists, come up with a detailed plan and then present it in a blog post. As
Gijs explained earlier, we don't have a detailed plan yet.

The rationale has been laid down in both threads by various people, but
it's fine to disagree with the finer points or with the entire plan. What
is not cool is to insinuate that there has been no public discussion about
this plan, which is still in its infancy.

Cheers,
Panos
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