[kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Eike Hein]

On 04/27/2016 06:36 PM, Daniel Vrátil wrote:
> I like the idea of having Thunderbird in KDE. It shows that we are an open
> community and welcoming towards "outside" projects and of course it would be
> also a good PR for both sides.

No, it wouldn't. The message wouldn't be "KDE community is open to the
outside", it would be "KDE offers shelter to legacy project, hoping to
salvage some attention from it".

Make no mistake, Thunderbird is a dead project. It's built on a toolkit
that's EOL, and hardly has enough of a development community to sustain
the app, much less the stack beneath it. That it has users (like me)
that still use it despite the mounting bitrot and deteriorating
performance doesn't change that outlook. Many people who use Thunderbird
want to switch away from Thunderbird.

KDEPIM does face some similar challenges, but is actually much further
along on componentizing its codebase to where e.g. moving from QWidget
tovother toolkits is feasible, and QtCore is far from dead. As a
developer, if I wanted to work on email stuff, I'd rather go there than
invest my hours into Thunderbird. And that's part of the problem, too.

If we were to incubate Thunderbird, it would need to supply really
really strong answers for how it's going to pull its own weight to
offset the resource and PR cost.


> Cheers,
> Dan

Cheers,
Eike