The applications is mentioned in https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/mailextensions#basic-extension-properties, but is missing in https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/mailextensions/supported-manifest-keys, which from my understanding should list all supported keys.

The removal of nsIEditorStyleSheets necessitates the following changes:

• addOverrideStyleSheet(uri) -> windowUtils.loadSheetUsingURIString(uri, windowUtils.AGENT_SHEET)
• removeOverrideStyleSheet(uri) -> windowUtils.removeSheet(uri, windowUtils.AGENT_SHEET)
• enableStyleSheet(uri, enable) -> (enable ? windowUtils.loadStyleSheetUsingURIString : windowUtils.removeSheet)(uri, windowUtils.AGENT_SHEET)

The TB 68->78 changes page should mention this.

https://dev.to/christiankaindl/a-webextension-guide-36ag

https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/building-thunderbird/artifact-builds#artifact-builds-on-the-try-server

This is the first mention of the try server in the developer docs if you're reading them in order, and it's written as if you already know what the try server is. It should either explain it here, or provide a link to where it does get explained.

Poking around a bit, it looks like the place it gets explained is https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/fixing-a-bug/try-server

I don't think the link at https://github.com/thundernest/developer-docs/blob/master/thunderbird-development/building-thunderbird/README.md#make-your-build-faster really provides any insight on how to set up ccache. I also think it's now recommended to use sccace for Firefox, not sure if that also applies to TB.

In Bug 1513652 on Bugzilla, Ben laid out what he would like to see documented in the docs. Below is what he said.

Also, I've been compiling a sort of wishlist for what I'd ultimately like to see in a TB development guide.

Most of the bullet points are a little arbitrary and incomplete, but hopefully it gives a flavour.
I've split up into 3 main sections: "Getting Started", "Reference" and "Architecture".

Again, a lot of these things could be annotated links to existing docs, at least to begin with.

---

Getting Started

• Updated Start_Hacking guide
• Assorted "How To" guides
  • how to add a unit test
  • debugging tips
  • TB-centric Bugzilla guide
• Where to ask for help
• Relationship between M-C and C-C
• High-level architectural view

Reference

XPCOM reference

• Overview - goals, issues, common pitfalls
• Best practices/patterns/idioms
• API reference
  • Index of core platform APIs - strings, XPCOM, file access etc
  • Index of firefox APIs
  • Index of TB APIs
  • Note clearly which ones are being phased out, and their replacements
  • Docs autogenerated from code where possible, but make sure not to overwhelm with detail.
  • Curated index of important APIs
  • Ongoing effort to improve/clarify docs.
    If you can't easily document an API, then it's probably too complicated :-)

C++ environment

• C++-specific APIs
• Coding style
• Thread safety rules
• Linting/static analysis tools

JS environment

• JS-specific API reference (eg OS.File et al)
• preferred idioms
  • async/await vs promises vs generators
  • modules (do we have our own module system or are we moving toward some existing standard?)
• coding style
  • to run linter to check
• GUI (eg are we shifting from XUL to more HTML-based?)

Testing

• unit tests
• mozmill/mochi/whatever
• how to run/write/debug tests

Tools

• mach
• linting
• testing

Source layout

Index of stuff which is deprecated/on the way out and what replaces it.
(eg using OS.File over nsIFile),

Curated index of interesting/useful blog posts/articles about TB development,
with some indication of relevance/staleness.

Architecture

Concepts, intentions, aspirations.
JS/C++ split - where the boundaries should be.
Threading model
Plugin/extension model

@jorgk3 suggested to limit the Thunderbird versions add-ons would be compatible with to reduce the reviewer burden.

Note: This issue was originally created in the atn-review-policy repository.
thunderbird/atn-review-policy#5

On this page, it says:

With TB70, window objects don't need to be and cannot be QI'ed to nsIDOMChromeWindow, nsIDOMWindow and nsIInterfaceRequestor. You can just remove its usage, this is backwards compatible to TB 68. See the fix applied to enigmail.

but what about other interfaces? e.g. nsIMsgWindow? Do we still need to QI for that? This should be clarified.

The Services.prompt.select() function now takes one argument less: no longer is it an array length followed by the array - now it's just the array (and it determines the length itself). I'm sure you can find an appropriate example...

For example, https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/fixing-a-bug/landing-a-patch#pushing-to-try mentions "IRC (#maildev)". This, and possibly other places, should mention "Matrix chat (#maildev:mozilla.org)" instead.

TIL that we have the browser_parsable_css.js test that checks for any typos or mistakes in our CSS files.
This test runs whenever we push something to the server but it can also run locally.
We should add a section in the "Fixing a bug" page recommending running this test locally whenever a CSS file is changed.

On this part of the site:

https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/about-add-ons

we should, IMHO, have not just a section with the information about changes in versions 61-68, but also a similar section with the information regarding changes in versions 53-60, which currently appears here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Add-ons_Guide_57

The new App Menu is part of daily now, so we should consider writing down a small tutorial on how to generate and append custom menuitems inside the various sections, and how to create sliding subsections.

The xpcshell.ini example is missing, looks like you've skipped straight to the next example. Original is still here that you can copy https://github.com/darktrojan/developer-docs/blob/master/addingTests.rst

An important API function removed over the past year is document.getAnonymousElementByAttribute().

See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1591145

The TB 68->78 changes pages should discuss this and suggest an alternative.

We have seen this to be a major issue with forks being created and users manually have to switch. The new policies should open up a way to define "abandoned" and let us re-assign an owner.

Step to Reproduce

0. Open tps://developer.thunderbird.net/
1. Go to Resources and Additional Documentation
2. Click on MailExtension URL in the table (it opens a new tab that goes to https://thunderbird-webextensions.readthedocs.io/en/68/)
3. Click on the "latest version" URL in the note block

Actual Behavior

It takes a lot of clicks to finally get to the MailExtension API documentation. Further, it's not obvious at first that the first link you need to click on to get to the doc is in the "Resources and Additional Documentation" section.

Expected Behavior

Having a top-level item in the main menu that send you directly to the API doc would be a good minimal solution. Having the documentation on developer.t.n instead of read the doc would be even better but that could be a separate issue since it'll need more work to migrate the doc.

Images on these pages are not visible for me.
https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/hello-world
https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/building-thunderbird/artifact-builds
The Thunderbird logo is also not visible in the site header. Instead of the images I see a "missing image" placeholder. The console reports CORS issues like this:

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://gstatic.gitbook.com/js/111.e4f7ad42.js. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).

this page: https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/upgrading-add-ons-for-tb68/list-of-changes-in-thunderbird-core#changed-api has a list of contents on the right side. It is truncated on a small screen ( 10 in) and there is no scroll bar.

I have developed a bootstrap add-on which was previously working on thunderbird v60. In order to make it compatible with the new thunderbird version ( currently testing on 67 beta ), i stared by changing the install.rdf file ( which was working fine on version 60 ) to a manifest.json file.

My manifest.json looks like the following:

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "applications": {
    "gecko": {
      "id": "[email protected]",
      "strict_min_version": "67.0a1"
    }
  },
  "name": "SmartMail",
  "description": "",
  "version": "2.0",
  "author": "[amine]",
  "legacy": {
    "type": "bootstrap",
    "options": {
      "page": "",
      "open_in_tab": true
    }
  },
  "icons": {
    "64": "chrome/content/images/unisex32.png",
    "32": "chrome/content/images/unisex32.png",
    "16": "chrome/content/images/unisex32.png"
  }
}

However, when i try to install the extension (add-ons --> debug add-on), i get the following error message:

Reading manifest: Error processing legacy: Value must either: be a boolean, or not contain an unexpected "type" property

Create a small tutorial with some snippets on how to generate and add a custom toolbarbutton to our main Toolbar.

This example is useful to showcase how a developer can generate custom elements to dynamically load and append in the Thunderbird UI.

Really minor, but the developer docs have https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird whereas thunderbird.net has https://blog.thunderbird.net/

In the <textbox> paragraph on https://github.com/thundernest/developer-docs/blob/master/add-ons/updating/tb78/changes.md
<script src="chrome://global/content/editMenuOverlay.js.js"/>
should be
<script src="chrome://global/content/editMenuOverlay.js"/>

https://developer.thunderbird.net/contributing/fixing-a-bug/using-mercurial-queues describes using mq. For various reasons the current recommendation is to use bookmarks, so for people who don't know either I think we should be recommending bookmarks. I think we should:

• Make bookmarks the first link in that section
• Put a banner on the mq page saying that developers should prefer bookmarks.

We should add a section dedicated to the Linting of the code before pushing a patch, listing the commands and some formatting example.

Since we're adopting Prettier we should also list all the available extensions for the most commonly used code editors and IDEs.

Some add-on developers have to yet convert their code to Custom Elements and remove the deprecated XBL bindings.

We should extend the Remove XBL Bindings section with some code snippets and useful tools: https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updates/tb68#removed-xbl-bindings

Eg:

• XBL to Custom Element Converter: https://bgrins.github.io/xbl-analysis/converter/
• XBL Analysis: https://bgrins.github.io/xbl-analysis/
• A list of approved bugs with code DIFF to use as reference.

In the TB 68 extension update docs, it says:

It is possible to have both install.rdf and manifest.json files in your extension, so you could release a version compatible with Thunderbird 60 and 68. It is not recommended.

This is a pretty significant statement to make: You're recommending extension authors drop compatibility with v60 and earlier when updating their extensions for 68... I really feel you should give a reason for this dis-recommendation.

importing js:
var { Foo } = Cu.import("resource://foo/modules/Foo.jsm", null);

this is now necessary already in 60.6.1. Documentation says it was added in TB 67

Xul conversion document:

It States that overlays in TB have been removd and recommends to use Messenger.xul.
That Statement is not quite correct.
For example searchdialog.xul still exists in 68b1.
So Maybe state most overlays have been removed.
I would have saved me a few hours of wonderment and Code analysis.
Thanks Klaus

./mach install-moz-phab

is needed to install phabricator.

https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/fixing-a-bug/try-server

The closest I could find on here was "it works pretty similar to Firefox's try server" and links to their docs. But the "how to view your results" on the Firefox Try docs only links the Firefox try server and ftp.

Should add a Thunderbird-specific how to view the results.
Treeherder: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try-comm-central

I haven't found the FTP where the builds get put yet, or I'd have a PR for this. :-)

This happened before TB 86:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682941

Now, the the TB 78->91 changes page does mention a change to nsIMsgFolder.subFolders - but not the correct change. The change isn't abandoning nsISupportsArray in favor of a JS array, but rather replacing nsISimpleIterator with nsIArray.

See also #127.

The link for "Tips for making builds faster." in Make Your Build Faster section refers to the Get Started section. This section doesn't talk about tips to build TB faster.
At least, the page Tips and Tricks is more appropriate than Get Started page, even if there is no information about building TB faster.

On Mozilla developer website, Tips for making builds faster refers to Making builds faster.

By replacing the link https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/getting-started by https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Mozilla_build_FAQ#making_builds_faster for Tips for making builds faster in Make Your Build Faster, it can be more understandable.

The nsIMessageCopyService interface has had methods renamed to start with lowercase letters:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1715433

and while the service is mentioned on the TB 78->91 page, that's only in context of the switch to JS arrays.

Was a full pass made over the mercurial log to make sure all the changes covered by the page?

For Firefox we have a download badge e.g. now on this page:

Three years ago I asked for this on Discourse and on GitHub.

However, where I can find the same for Thunderbird (add-ons)?

Cross-posted to the Mozilla Discourse forum and Thunderbird Topicbox.

There are a few things that will make working with bookmarks better:

• the hg evolve extension, despite it being experimental
• colors
• the hg wip command, which is defined through hgrc

I'd suggest we either link to or provide a .hgrc that includes some of the features Thunderbird developers commonly work with and make some recommendations on what extensions to enable.

Now that calendar is close to being integrated into TB (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1608610), it is my understanding that support for legacy extensions will be going away soon after, possibly as soon as the next TB beta that will be released after the Firefox 73 merge on Feb 10 (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar). The docs should help add-on devs understand and prepare for this. Here are a few things we can do. There are probably others as well.

• Mail/WebExtensions Experiments should be more prominent, for example a brief description and link to further docs on the "About Add-ons" page (like what's currently on the "Updating Legacy Extensions for Thunderbird 78" page).

• On the "About Add-ons" page there should be a stronger message that legacy extensions are deprecated, with support soon to be removed, with a mention of approximately when they are going away.

Hi there,

Thanks so much for your work documenting Thunderbird developer processes.
I was excited this morning to read about the new changes in Thunderbird 102.
However, when I attempted to build the binary from the mercurial package, I found that the instruction manual for building Thunderbird is no longer of much use to project outsiders. For reference: https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/building-thunderbird

The guide suggests using the mach command to build Thunderbird from the root of the mercurial repository. However, there is no sign of a mach command within the repository, and when I searched online for Mozilla's mysterious mach command, I couldn't find the shell script anywhere online. I looked for it in Gentoo's package repository, because they usually have to host build processes in a very public way, but I had no success there.

Could someone please update the guide with instructions for general users intending on building Thunderbird from scratch, or simply direct me to a copy of the mach command? Building an open source program is usually as simple as running ./configure, followed by make install. I was able to run Thunderbird 102 from the website's binary Linux download. However, doing it this way (from my Downloads directory) doesn't read any data from my ~/.thunderbird directory, so I'm not really able to see Thunderbird 102 in action with my current email accounts. Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind regards,
Seán Healy

https://vuepress.github.io

I hope this is the right location for this.

I have just noticed that the developer.thunderbird.net support site has a header pointing to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/thunderbird

Given the audience of the site it is probably more relevant to point this link to a page showing addon and developer links, not general 8user support. perhaps https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/community

Now that daily is free of <textbox> elements, it might be helpful to write down a quick HOW-TO guide for add-on developers who might need to do the same.

Here's everything I learned while working on this:

• Add aria-labelledby="labelID" to the html:input for accessibility.
• All the proper styles and classes should come from the input-fields.css, most likely all the various cases should be covered by those CSS declarations.
• Use the class .input-container on an HBOX when you need the input field to behave like a flex="1" as the attribute flex="" doesn't do anything on the input field, so it can/must be removed.
• Add the globalOverlay.js and editMenuOverlay.js if the right click (context menu) doesn't work on an input field.
• Specify the field type, like type="text", type="number", etc.
• Visually compare the fields before and after the conversion to be sure the UI, sizing, and spacing doesn't change.
• Always look if any JS method is interacting with the fields you're updating to check if the textbox tag name is used for conditions or similar. Eg. if (element.localName == "textbox") { or getElementsByTagName("textbox")

Yesterday comm-central was busted when I did a try server run (which failed due to the bustage). I followed the docs to redo the try run with a mozilla-central changeset that was earlier than the one that busted comm-central. The docs could be improved for this use case.

The relevant docs are here, but they cover a different use case, and didn't work for me when I tried to follow them. I had to get some help on IRC, and what I ended up having to do is not what was described in the docs.

All I had to do was add a GECKO_HEAD_REV line to my .gecko_rev.yml file so it looked like this:

GECKO_BASE_REPOSITORY: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified
GECKO_HEAD_REPOSITORY: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central
GECKO_HEAD_REF: default
GECKO_HEAD_REV: 7faec8e0996bce01fdd1bb9f1b2a1c60045de16c

One thing I didn't realize, since these docs don't mention it, is that you have to commit your changes to the .gecko_rev.yml file for them to take effect on the try server.

Since bustages are still common, I think it would be worth having a different section in the docs to cover this scenario.

JaneK recently wrote:

One thing that apparently changed with toobarbuttons (type=menu or type=menu-button) is that you have to include the dropmarker as child of the button:

<toolbarbutton type="menu-button">
<menupopup ..>
...
</menupopup>
<dropmarker type="menu-button" class="toolbarbutton-menubutton-dropmarker" />
</toolbarbutton>

I had a similar issue with a toolbarbutton that shows a menu.

We need to update the docs in order to reflect the new NotificationBox implementation based on the abstract class available from toolkit.

An initial reference is here: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/addons/T321f9b5d0964e424-Ma3ec42bc020def36c8745dd0

Here we have the following link: parseXULToFragment(). But - this link is dead.

We should migrate the Chat Core section from MDN, and all its subsections, to DTN.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Chat_Core

We should implement an "Iconography" section in the Add-ons category to help add-ons developers properly create or select images and SVGs for their add-ons.

These are the areas we should highlight:

• Create SVGs for toolbar buttons
• HiDPI PNGs
• Recommended software for image creation

I'll create a PR with this section later next week.