36011 - (biff) [meta] Biff/new mail notification tracking bug

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect, P3)

Description

I just wanted to create a master bug that points to all of the biff related work
we need to do.  I will mark this M16, but eventually once we've finished all of
the M16 biff bugs I will move this.

Comment 1

[selmer (gone)]

Target M17.

Comment 2

[scottputterman]

moving to M19

Comment 3

[fenella]

Sheelar is the new QA now.

Comment 4

[Sheela Ravindran]

cc-ing Bhuvan.

Comment 5

[scottputterman]

reassigning to racham

Comment 6

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

taking, I'm the biff whipping boy now.

Comment 7

[Michael K]

Educate a newbie.

Whatsa "biff"?

I figure it has something to do with a component window in Mozilla?

Comment 8

[Oliver Klee]

The "biff" is the notification when you get new mail (by a sound and/or a pop-up
message and/or a systray icon).

Comment 9

[ravi]

the name comes from an old unix command that does new mail
notification (text based). supposedly, it was named after
the author's dog, which had a tendency to bark when the
mailman arrived (as most dogs do). the veracity of this i
leave to your verification!

Comment 10

[Aleksey Nogin]

Is this tracking bug still relevant? Or should the Component: Mail Notification
be used instead?

Comment 11

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 12

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 13

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

We're moving to as little unmaintained tracking bugs as possible, while there's been some recent biff-related work, this bug might be closed if it's unmaintained, waiting for second thoughts though.

Comment 14

[Karsten Düsterloh]

I'd understand if you'd want to close double or finished tracking bugs, but what's the point of closing a meta bug with open issues?

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

because it's not serving much of a purpose

1) only 2 bugs have been added in 4 years
2) the logical relationship of some of these bugs to the others is dubious
3) ~90 bugs regarding biff, notification, etc (not including news!) - http://tinyurl.com/462mb8 - there is no way we'd want to lump them all together or attempt to track them all in a single meta
4) poor progress here is more a factor of higher priorities and lack of interested hackers, and won't improve just by updating the meta


So I'm inclined to agree with comment 13 unless we see these 3 items converge
a) it will help in diagnosis, or motivate/drive people interest
b) it's badly wanted by drivers for TB3 (UI polish, quality, etc)
c) turn this or some other bug into an uber bug, as an umbrella to a few more narrowly scoped metas like bug 11056

Otherwise, better I think for a few caring persons to just pick a few key bugs, drill into the code to fix them*, and when we have several fixed knock on all the other bugs (in a bugday?) to see which are gone and which are still broken.

* only a small percentage of these http://tinyurl.com/3uencd (few fixed in last 600 days) address what this meta might want to address

cc: rkent who I think has had some success with metas, and humphrey and standard8 who did a nice job with bug 459487

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #15)
> So I'm inclined to agree with comment 13 unless we see these 3 items converge
> a) it will help in diagnosis, or motivate/drive people interest
> b) it's badly wanted by drivers for TB3 (UI polish, quality, etc)

or TB3.1

Comment 17

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

(In reply to comment #14)
> I'd understand if you'd want to close double or finished tracking bugs, but
> what's the point of closing a meta bug with open issues?

I think the idea is that, if no one is willing to keep the meta bug up-to-date, there's little point in having it around.

In any case, we should probably clean up the old fixed issues on this bug for readability.

Comment 18

[Kent James (:rkent)]

I don't have strong opinions on closing this bug, but it is not serving any purpose to me.

Comment 19

[David Humphrey (:humph)]

I am actively working on biff bugs, and didn't know about this tracking bug at all--apologies for not digging around first.

I'm fine to close this, but I'd love some help figuring out what does and doesn't have value in all these biff bugs.  Not all are compatible with one another imo.  If someone can help me identify which ones need doing pre-TB3, I'll do my best to work through them.

Comment 20

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Tracking bugs concentrate the "knowledge" which bugs belong to certain area of problems not covered by their own category. Not being maintained cries for cleanup, but closing the bugs just makes searching bugs harder - one open meta bug doesn't hurt anyone, open _real_ bugs do...

Comment 21

[Rich Gray (:rbgray)]

I just realized that I should CC: myself to this for notifications of new bugs.  I think this could be quite useful if people would bother to add biff bugs her and I shall try to do so as I come across things.  No point in closing it until all the bugs are resolved.

Comment 23

[Worcester12345]

Is Scott Putterman still following this bug?

Comment 24

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Removing myslef on all the bugs I'm cced on. Please NI me if you need something on MailNews Core bugs from me.