Thunderbird bz 579023 still not fixed even though there is an upstream fix available

[Kevin Kofler]

Christopher Aillon wrote:

> On 04/27/2010 02:58 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> (In addition, Thunderbird bundles xulrunner, but there's no fix available
>> for that issue at this time.)
> 
> I'm not sure why I'm bothering responding if you're not going to even
> read responses, such as:
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-April/135250.html

I know about this. No fix available at this time means that we can't expect 
you to apply a fix which doesn't exist. That doesn't mean the OTHER problems 
don't need fixing.

> But, I'll re-iterate what Jan told you earlier in the thread that we've
> been working on it with upstream and have been for a while, and it's a
> HUGE undertaking.  We've already made significant progress and have
> gotten quite a bit of the changes needed merged upstream already.  See
> moz bug 377319 for the details.

The biggest problem there is that you're trying to port the whole 
Thunderbird to the "stable" APIs. Firefox can get away with using the 
unstable API just fine, why can't this be done for Thunderbird? It just 
means it needs to be updated in lockstep, even if the matching upstream 
branch is not declared stable.

But of course the underlying true issue is that Mozilla is refusing to 
guarantee backwards compatibility for the interfaces pretty much all 
existing apps used and in several cases still use, instead trying to force 
everyone to port to their new public API. I can't judge whether the original 
interfaces were so poorly designed they really can't be kept compatible 
(which reflects poorly on Mozilla) or whether they're just adding a useless 
wrapper because they refuse to stay compatible (which reflects even more 
poorly on them). But of course this issue is something only a full-blown 
fork could even attempt to solve. And of course Firefox gets to use the 
private API forever. Wasn't Mozilla among the ones complaining about IE 
using private APIs? Why are they doing the same in Firefox?

        Kevin Kofler