Comments on: What do Thunderbird extension developers need?

By: David Hodgson

David Hodgson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:29:01 +0000

I look forward to anything that simplifies development. In particular, lots of code snippets would be nice!

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:24:28 +0000

One problem is that extension development documentation is focused on Firefox, not on cross-application-development. XUL is the same with every application, Mozilla Documentation should reflect that.

The biggest problem is the need to restart the application to load changes, there’s no on-the-fly-development possible. I know that enabling this would be dangerous, because it could break the application, but if there were a development kit that did enable that, in a sandbox, with the developers knowing that complex extensions could be causing the application to crash, that would rock.

Another problem is the lack of documentation for the basic functionality of Thunderbird, and how my extension can become part of that.
I’m sure everything’s there somewhere, but it’s not always easy to find that stuff.

By: Vadim

Vadim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:54:19 +0000

Have no idea was my comment lost or something but as a extension developer I want to have access to plain message text not in the MIME form but before it got htmlized by Thunderbird. Actually, having ability to convert to/from MIME and htmlize strings in Thunderbird style would be awesome. And ability to run background threads too, but that’s probably not going to happen soon.

By: Leni

Leni — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:05:30 +0000

Here is a part of an email I recieved from a Zindus user.

> Can you offer a link to documentation regarding the development
> and, more importantly, debugging of thunderbird add-ons?
> I’m having a recurring problem in Lightning and I’d like to contribute
> by trying to narrow down the cause (and ideally provide a fix).

My response summarized the setup of a dev environment with links to the mailing lists.

Wanting to debug something you are using is a natural entry point for new developers. Easing this transition might encourage more people to move a step along the path from “user” to tester/developer.

Search “debug Thunderbird extension” to get a sense of the content currently available. The good news: plenty of room for improvement!

By: James Anastasios

James Anastasios — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:01:45 +0000

I agree with Joshua. Now it’s easy for me to find what I want, but I was nearly discouraged at the start by the lack of a clear source of documentation.

By: Leni

Leni — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:41:52 +0000

A short tutorial on how to use the Venkman debugger. Maybe even a short video. Would cover: install, configure, set a break point, run, inspect a variable.

By: Joshua Cranmer

Joshua Cranmer — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:33:04 +0000

When starting work on my listarchive extension, I didn't find the basic "Building an extension for Thunderbird" page on MDC, only the Firefox one; I think that one easy thing to do is to publicize said page a bit more prominently. I also have some opinions on making stuff easier in creating new account types; in the present state, a pure JS account type seems to be impossible, although kill-RDF will fix the current problems I am having.

By: Aza Raskin

Aza Raskin — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:19:44 +0000

We’ve been thinking about this in Labs. We should talk