Re: Mozilla Sunbird Application Revival

Hey Jonah,

I'm happy to hear you'd like to put energy into getting back something 
like Sunbird. I generally agree to Mark, I think it would make more 
sense to join forces, as there would be lots of benefit for Lightning 
too. The more people work on the Calendar Project in general the greater 
options we can provide to the user.

The one big concern I have with starting a new version of Sunbird is one 
that has happened in the past even with a team of full time developers 
on the project: Feature divergence. What happens if there is a new 
Lightning feature? Given we have discontinued Sunbird, I would not 
require a new developer or current Lightning community developer to make 
it compatible to the Sunbird port. This means you will be running after 
Lightning to port the features, just as Lightning is running after 
Thunderbird and the Mozilla Platform in general. Managing a such project 
is a full time job, please don't underestimate that.

Mark's suggestion is actually one I have been dreaming of for some time. 
If you follow this incentive, it will be much easier to manage. You can 
get started with the project quite easily and work on bugs that benefit 
an integration between Lightning and Thunderbird so that the Mail 
features are not visible if there is no mail account. Here is a quote 
from one of our blog posts:

"""
A vision we have come up with and other users have also brought up is to 
make Lightning modify Thunderbird so far that starting from a new 
profile gives you the option of either a calendar or mail account (or 
both). If you choose Calendar, then you will be presented with only 
calendar relevant UI (i.e similar to what Sunbird is today). You will 
not be bothered with mail features unless you need them (i.e you want to 
invite attendees and send invitations to them). This would have the 
benefit of shared features like the address book being available without 
much extra work.
"""

This fits the "user ease" requirement, since the user will only be asked 
for an account at the beginning and will not have to cope with 
Thunderbird's accounts until a feature is requested that requires Email 
features.

Even with Today's state I think there are no hard requirements. An 
Internet connection is not needed if you just create an Empty Mail & 
blogs account (this is a requirement that could probably be removed by 
fixing a bug or two) and use the local calendar account.

Regarding the UI template, here is another quote from that blog post. I 
think that a standalone Calendar needs a bit more than to copy what 
Lightning has or stay with what we used to do in Sunbird.

"""
What Sunbird needs is a vision of its own. That means, that new 
Lightning features should no longer be incorporated into Sunbird by 
default. Instead Sunbird needs to get its own identity to attract new 
users. If you have experience with user interfaces, Sunbird could use 
your help to create a new and innovative way for users to manage their 
appointments.
"""

With that said, I think it makes sense to put up some concepts on how 
Lightning could look with Thunderbird's Email features disabled. Ideally 
in form of a UI mockup. I'm happy to blog about something like this.

If you are interested in getting started with this kind of future, 
please do email me and/or discuss here. I'm happy to give some guidance 
in getting started with patching the Calendar Project, then we can 
discuss what bugs need to be fixed and put up some sort of roadmap. 
Maybe you can put up a plan of things you'd like to change to 
Thunderbird/Lightning to give it a standalone feel, then we can match 
that up to bugs to divide the work into manageable chunks.

Thanks,
Philipp