Re: mozilla.org and ports

paul wrote:

> I understand that BeOS is not officially supported, but, a little 
> concideration would be nice.  The IPC bug is not the first time, that 
> certain parts of mozilla that are new features, have just been "turned 
> on", which breaks the ports.  I am the primary developer of the BeOS 
> port, and, was never informed about the fact that this change was 
> going to be implemented.  

I know how you feel, Paul. I am the primary OpenVMS developer and I 
didn't find out about this until I discovered last week that I needed 
--disable-profilesharing to build 
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178806#c18). Now I have to 
come up with an IPC solution for OpenVMS pdq.

> Now, there may be a mailing list or forum that might have announced 
> it, but, with the amount of junk mail I get everyday, I don't need 
> more email.  Most of the mailing lists/newsgroups where I would expect 
> this information to be posted, if it was, though I can't find it, are 
> used to the point, that I just don't have the time to monitor them.  
> Might I suggest a low-volume developer-announce mailing list, that is 
> read-only, to keep the volume low.  This way, when major changes are 
> going to be made, the people that care to be informed, can be?  At 
> least something, because the current management of the tree, as far as 
> working with outside developers, is really rather poor, to the point 
> where I could see it discouraging further ports, if it hasn't already. 

Agreed. We need some mechanism by which us "second tier" developers can 
be kept informed of what's happening. Finding out some new feature has 
been added (which will require some porting effort) only when your build 
breaks is not real developer-friendly.

Colin.