Silver's Weblog - Time for a New Roadmap

Time for a New Roadmap

Now that it has been officially stated that XULRunner is dead, it is time for a ChatZilla Roadmap Change™.

The original XULRunner and ChatZilla plan was to wait until the 1.9 version of XULRunner was officially distributed - 1.8 was never going to have the necessary shared UI or support - and then produce a ChatZilla package that works on it. Ideally, we would use the same XPI as for Firefox, SeaMonkey, etc. installs, although there were/are still some pretty critical hurdles to overcome for that to work. Even if it was a separate XPI, it would be a normally-size ChatZilla XPI, and could be on Firefox Add-ons.

So much for that.

After getting over the initial "WTF?" reaction, we need to decide on the way forward for ChatZilla on XULRunner. Thanks to tH's wonderful ChatZilla on XULRunner page (which include mozilla.org built nightlies from the appropriate dates), we do actually have a measurable percentage of our user base running this configuration. A small percentage, but not zero.

• Do we build XULRunner ourselves? This would require a lot of effort on our part, and really should be shared with other projects if possible.
• Do we only make available our ChatZilla package, and tell users to find their own XULRunner (or link to someone else who is making them)?
• Do we give up trying to support XULRunner entirely?

Right now, I don't know, but the last option is looking disappointingly good.

Permalink | Author: Silver | Tags: Mozilla, ChatZilla, XULRunner | Posted: 04:19PM on Monday, 14 May, 2007 | Comments: 4

I suspect that most IRC users are not Mozilla saavy and are just looking for a good standalone IRC client, so if you want to be useful to the most numbers of users, then the ideal thing to do is option #1: build and distribute a single XULRunner+ChatZilla package.

Otherwise, option #2, which is the current situation given the ChatZilla on XULRunner page, is ok for Mozilla-savvy users like me.

Permalink | Author: Myk Melez | Posted: 08:46PM on Monday, 14 May, 2007

Option #2 isn't exactly the same as now; currently, tH grabs nightly builds from mozilla.org and makes them available on his site, each taken at an official milestone (since mozilla.org doesn't make any milestone builds available itself); it was not clear to me from mitchell's post that such nightly XULRunner builds will continue to exist - I had already heard at the time of the original post that the 1.8 branch XULRunner tinderboxes had gone, for example. If they do continue with the nightly XULRunner builds, it adds a 4th option: continue with the current status quo.

For now, I'm just waiting for some of the dust to settle, and see what's actually going to change.

Permalink | Author: Silver | Posted: 01:14PM on Tuesday, 15 May, 2007

To be clear, I only have 1.8.0.9 as the recommended build on my page a) to make software update work for Windows and Linux users, and b) to provide a universal binary for Mac users. These were fixed in 1.8.0.5 and 1.8.0.7 respectively, but I waited a bit because the tinderboxes were patchy and I didn't want to use "unofficial" builds. Once it became obvious there weren't going to be any more 1.8.0 releases, I changed my page.

There was a similar situation with the timer problem (bug 319219), fixed in 1.8.0.2, but I waited and 1.8.0.4 appeared.

Permalink | Author: tH | Posted: 02:21PM on Tuesday, 15 May, 2007

Nothing special but I thought I would let you know that I would indeed prefer your option #1.  As you imagine, I am no great expert and could not help [unless you want a German translation!].  I am sure the vast majority of current users think likewise.

Cheers from Steglitz

Permalink | Author: Trevor Adcock | Posted: 08:29PM on Thursday, 04 October, 2007

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