Project

General

Profile

Is Icedove not longer a prioritary project in Parabola?

eliotime3000 - about 3 years ago -

Greetings.

I've been checking that the last update of Iceweasel to the version 78.x is stacked into the version 78.5.0. However, since that moment, Icedove in the stable branch is still on the version 68.9.0 and the claims from part of Enigmail users has been increasing so far. Actually, I know that exist a package that solves the compatibility issues with Icedove, but since the version 78, the GnuPG support has became native and actually is a neat addition since that I'm using it in my Arch partition.

Actually, the version of Thunderbird source code is on the version 78.8.1 and it haves A LOT of bugfixes, and the Enigmail package on Arch repo is nothing but a transition package for Thunderbird's PGP feature.

I dont' know if someone in Parabola userbase is still using Icedove so far, or has changed their email client.


Replies (4)

Is Icedove not longer a prioritary project in Parabola? - bill-auger - about 3 years ago -

i started packaging the latest icedove in december; but it would
not build easily - it will need some significant attention to
get it working; so i published my WIP PKGBUILD, and set it aside
- i was hoping that someone else would complete before i
returned to it; but no one has - i would not conclude that it's
priority has changed; rather ive noticed that we tend to
become understaffed during the northern winter months

the most practical measure of priority is the (desirability /
maintenance time) ratio - by that measure, icecat is at a lower
priority - it is just as difficult to maintain as iceweasel; but
it's desirability is lower - that is because there are several
other email clients, which offer the same features, but are much
easier to maintain - if icedove were not so popular, its
priority would be nearly zero; and it could be discarded with no
loss of functionality to the parabola system - however, it is
relatively popular; so as a matter of priority, it is the
maintenance time which is impeding progress

i could not understate how difficult it is, to maintain FSDG-fit
builds of mozilla software on a rolling distro - it could be a
full-time role, for one person to maintain all of the mozilla
software in parabola - grizzlyuser has been maintaining
iceweasel; and that one package is a significant contribution to
parabola - that is how we are able to keep iceweasel up to speed
- it would be great if someone could do the same for icedove

RE: Is Icedove not longer a prioritary project in Parabola? - eliotime3000 - about 3 years ago -

So far, I've seen that Guix version of Icedove is advancing in just rename the app from "unofficial branding" mode (known as daily). It could be easier if we implements some stuff from Guix's Icedove and adapt it into Parabola Icedove.

RE: Is Icedove not longer a prioritary project in Parabola? - bill-auger - about 3 years ago -

i have not seen the guix recipe; but if all that it does, is to
re-brand the GUI, then it is not necessary - there would be
nothing special to "adapt to" - re-branding is only required if
significant changes are made to the default configuration, or
source code - other than the branding, it would be identical to
the arch 'thunderbird' package; and there would be no need for
'icedove'

the reason why the parahola's 'icedove' is slow to upgrade, is
because to is very difficult to build - a build recipe from
another distro is not likely to be helpful - for example, rust
software is very finicky about a particular build environment;
and has been increasingly difficult to built for 32bit systems
- the guix system is designed to create very specialized "frozen"
build environments; where a rolling distro does not have that
as a goal - mozilla software seems to be maintained on an LTS
distro (probably ubuntu) - i suspect that if parabola were a
ubuntu-derivative, then icedove would be much easier to build
- on parabola, everything rolls forward-only, at a faster rate
than LTS distros such as ubuntu; which means that software which
requires the same versions of software as ubuntu, is very often
incompatible with the parabola system, and needs significant
coercing to fit in

the suggestion was that icedove may be due for a re-evaluation -
thats probably true, and is always a good idea - perhaps the
most important factor though, for any evaluation, is: "just how
important is this software?" - as i noted in my previous
message, the (desirability/maintenance) ratio is not very high
for 'icedove', and there are several other programs available in
parabola, which do the same job, but are much easier to maintain

RE: Is Icedove not longer a prioritary project in Parabola? - bill-auger - almost 3 years ago -

icedove-78.9.1 is now in [libre-testing], if people want to test it out

    (1-4/4)