[HN Gopher] Sync for Thunderbird
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       Sync for Thunderbird
        
       Author : mariuz
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2022-03-20 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (bugzilla.mozilla.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (bugzilla.mozilla.org)
        
       | nine_k wrote:
       | The scoop: An issue opened 14 years ago with a patch that solves
       | it.
       | 
       | Never merged. The issue is kept alive by people wanting the
       | feature.
        
         | technobabbler wrote:
         | Thank you for the explanation.
         | 
         | Submissions like this are when I wish HN didn't have the
         | "original title" policy. It doesn't give you any context about
         | a link and why someone should care about it.
        
           | majkinetor wrote:
           | Nothing stops OP to comment it.
        
         | jcranmer wrote:
         | One of the chief issues preventing the merge at that time was
         | that it was the era of maximum hostility of the Mozilla
         | community to anything not named Firefox. Adding any code to
         | support Thunderbird in the core codebase would have been at the
         | mercy as to whether that module owner was nice or not.
        
           | tomrod wrote:
           | This brings up an interesting point. It is my opinion that
           | we're in the reverse now. Mozilla seems deadset on ruining
           | Firefox's competitive advantages -- some through reasonable
           | evolution (forcing new features on the community that only a
           | small subset ask for) to user hostility (Firefox mobile
           | redesign that dropped summer 2021, tanking its Android
           | reviews after it dropped extension support [and for me, text
           | scaling managed via about:config killed accessibility]).
           | 
           | While I can appreciate that there is funding to be found in
           | password managers and VPN services, I'd much rather see Rust
           | take over the world!
        
             | pigeons wrote:
             | They've dropped that password manager "Lockwise" faster
             | than a google product.
        
             | toyg wrote:
             | Rust taking over the world would bring Mozilla the same
             | sort of income that "Java taking over the world" brought
             | SUN. It's fundamentally irrelevant, in the great scheme of
             | things, because monetising a programming language has
             | always been very hard (and now all competitors are free,
             | they've effectively been commoditised).
             | 
             | I don't think they're "ruining" FF; if anything they're
             | again entirely focused on it after a decade spent in the
             | wilderness throwing money at doomed efforts. But they seem
             | somewhat lost on their actual mission, and make it very
             | hard to like them. Mozilla is not about making a browser,
             | nor it is a social-justice charity. It should be a beacon
             | of public interest in the darkness of everyday
             | commercialisation of the web. The browser should be a mean
             | to that end, not the be-all of the company.
        
               | charcircuit wrote:
               | >if anything they're again entirely focused on it after a
               | decade spent in the wilderness throwing money at doomed
               | efforts
               | 
               | But what features have they really added lately? I looked
               | over the the change logs over the last year and the only
               | notable new features to the browser was a theme color
               | wheel and adding search results (Ctrl + F) showing up on
               | the scroll bar. It doesn't seem like they are innovating
               | the browsing experience.
        
         | kevingadd wrote:
         | It sounds like within a year or so the underlying system was
         | refactored enough that the patch couldn't be landed as-is,
         | which makes sense. It's big enough that I can also imagine it
         | being hard to get a review if only 1-2 people know the system
         | well enough and don't find the time to review it... still quite
         | unfortunate.
         | 
         | I run into this sort of situation with OSS a lot lately, for
         | one PR I spent probably at least a dozen days total of my time
         | just rebasing it over and over because a project with hundreds
         | of contributors lands lots of commits every day.
        
           | throwaway984393 wrote:
           | I don't know your PR, but the way this is helped in
           | corporate-land is with very small PRs and feature flags. Some
           | maintainers are a lot more of a pain in the ass than others,
           | though.
        
             | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
             | This is great when it works, but I'm personally not
             | convinced that it works for every change. Some things are
             | genuinely just big changes, and doing them piecemeal is
             | (IMO) actually impractical. Granted, this is more likely to
             | be true with refactoring then features or bugfixes.
             | 
             | All of which is not to say that it's not a preferred style
             | when it does work. And as a _policy_ choice it is perfectly
             | reasonable to simply decree that the codebase will never be
             | refactored at that scale.
        
               | LadyCailin wrote:
               | Another alternative is to have code freezes, though that
               | comes with its own sets of cons. But you just need them
               | to be long enough to do the last rebase and merge, so in
               | theory can be relatively short.
        
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