Backwards development

[Gervase Markham]

Hi Denis,

On 18/11/15 20:16, Denis Roy wrote:
> Why does Mozilla do this backwards?  Wouldn't you want to improve the
> core project and have BMO (and everyone else) consume that?

In the last couple of years, we have been struggling with the impedance
mismatch of BMO's rapid release cycle (they ship weekly) and regular
requirements for improvements from Mozilla's management, with the
differing pace of development of upstream. For better or worse, the BMO
team have decided that working upstream, doing releases and then
shipping them on bugzilla.mozilla.org is not a model which works given
their constraints.

They do plan to merge the trunk into their codebase again soon, and I
hope that the upstream developers (as many as there are) will be able to
work together to take that opportunity to port upstream many of the
generally-applicable improvements that have been made on BMO.

> Short story -- does the Bugzilla project want contributions, or is it
> relegated to being a code dump for Mozilla's bug tracker?

The Bugzilla project is extremely keen to see contributions,
particularly from outside Mozilla. In fact, Bugzilla's future as an
independent software project depends on it.

Gerv