User talk:Dmose/Tb Post-3.0 Scratchpad

Could you motivate a bit more clearly (here or maybe in your upcoming 3.1-specific scratchpad) the choice of 1.9.2 as basis for Thunderbird 3.1? It appears that the end-of-life issue would be closing in quite rapidly on that branch as well. According to the Firefox meeting minutes, FF 3.6 release candidates are planned for early December. Consequently, the 1.9.1 end-of-life clock starts ticking and should expire in Summer 2010 already. If Firefox keeps up a 6-month release cycle, this would also be the time when 1.9.3 goes public, thus starting the 1.9.2 end-of-life clock with a target of December 2010. If Thunderbird 3.1 is made public in April based on 1.9.2, this would give it just 8 months of support for the underlying Gecko platform. In general, the rapid FF release cycles are rather scary, forcing other applications to keep up. At least their release-branch support cycles should be extended to allow applications to skip branches. --Rsx11m 03:52, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Largely, we don't really have much choice. The only other option is 1.9.3, and that's not likely to be stable in the timeframe we want it, and it drops support for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Agreed that the higher speed of Firefox releases effects us a bunch, and that's why we're trying to make Thunderbird releases significantly faster as well. --Dmose