379068 - Remove support for Netscape 4.x migration from the trunk

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[Scott MacGregor]

David and I were talking about this the other day. we all have a lot of heavy lifting to do in the mailnews code base to keep it relevant with the trunk going forward. That includes:

* Removing filespec
* Moving to frozen linkages

Life would be a small bit easier if we didn't have to perform this heavy lifting on the old netscape 4.x migration code (nsMessengerMigrator.cpp + the import tools + mail\components\migration\dogbert).

Netscape 4.x has been dead for coming up on more years than I can remember. Users who are still on 4.x and have not moved to seamonkey or Thunderbird will still be able to do so using the Mozilla 1.8.1 product lines which were just released and will be out in the wild for some time to come.

By the time seamonkey or Thunderbird ships a product from the trunk yet another year will have gone by and 4.x migration will be even less important by then.

So I'd like to remove this stuff. 

cc'ing Karsten and Mark for input in case they have thoughts / concerns, etc.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

adding a dotted line to the frozen linkages bug.

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

From an address book point of view, we are only able to import ldap address books - we've never had the code written to do the old na2 personal address books, so I'd be happy with that.

I had been thinking of moving that 4.x ldap address book supporting code out to the migration components from the AB to the specific migration code (its starting to get in the way of AB stuff), but dropping the support would make it even easier ;-)

With respect to the import of mail from 4.x I'm not so fussed. With SeaMonkey's pending transition to suiterunner, the nsMessengerMigrator stuff could in theory be moved out to migration or import, but there again, perhaps its time to just drop 4.x and move on.

The last release of Netscape Communicator was 4.8 in August 2002 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_4). Perhaps once we've all had chance to give our thoughts, we should get feedback from some of the newsgroups as well?

Comment 3

[Steffen Wilberg]

Somebody still running 4.x is likely to use a pretty old OS as well like Win9x or WinNT. Trunk builds have dropped support for those platforms anyway (bug 330276), so somebody who needs to migrate has to use 1.8.1 builds anyway.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: remove non-migration code that uses nsMessengerMigrator, and drop it from the build

This gets rid of the users of nsMessengerMigrator - if we need to resurrect it, we can, but I think we should make our lives easier and assume we don't need it.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: remove from outlook and oe import code

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Attachment: Removes xpcom_obsolete requires/lib dependencies

This patch will need the two attachment's David has put on this bug to build, but it does the final removal of the xpcom_obsolete dependencies from mailnews/

I've tested this on suiterunner so far (xpfe SeaMonkey is still compiling). David or Scott - I suggest this is tested on mac at least before checking in (I know mac had some lib problems when I tried to remove the dependency from addrbook but not the rest of the mailnews code - so removing it all it'll probably be alright anyway, but still worth checking ;-) )

Comment 7

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I've tested this on suiterunner so far (xpfe SeaMonkey is still compiling).

xpfe SeaMonkey just completed and it built fine.

Comment 8

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 263620 [details] [diff] [review]
remove non-migration code that uses nsMessengerMigrator, and drop it from the build

i guess it will be a race to see who lands nsIMsgAccountManager.idl changes first :)

we should fix mailnews\base\build too so we don't break seamonkey.

Comment 9

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 263627 [details] [diff] [review]
Removes xpcom_obsolete requires/lib dependencies

this looks good, but let me make sure it builds on the mac (I need to clean up something unrelated in my tree to get it to compile)

Comment 10

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 263627 [details] [diff] [review]
Removes xpcom_obsolete requires/lib dependencies

this patch seems to build fine on the mac.

Comment 11

[Ian Neal]

As someone who still has users (well for the next couple of months) using NS4.x, I've always found it easier to create a new profile from scratch as using the migration code always copied to much "cruft" in terms of files / pref settings from the old NS4.x profile and always struggled with NS 4.x profiles stored on network drives.

Comment 12

[Karsten Düsterloh]

> Somebody still running 4.x is likely to use a pretty old OS as well like Win9x
> or WinNT. Trunk builds have dropped support for those platforms anyway (bug
> 330276), so somebody who needs to migrate has to use 1.8.1 builds anyway.

The last Netscape version 4.80 was released in August 2002, so Win2k may be a target still, but essentially I agree. Browser stats show no significant numbers for it, so mail/news would be the key point at best - but addressbook migration from Netscape 4.x never worked anyway (in our official builds) and any remaining mail files could just be copied over (and noone wants to keep the .snm crap, I'm positive *g*).

Good bye, Netscape. ;-)

Comment 13

[David :Bienvenu]

cvs removed nsMessengerMigrator.cpp/h

Comment 14

[Steffen Wilberg]

> cvs removed nsMessengerMigrator.cpp/h
Really? I can't find that checkin.

Comment 15

[Steffen Wilberg]

hey, there it is, at 2007-05-10 13:42.

Comment 16

[David :Bienvenu]

thx, yes, I messed it up the first time

Comment 17

[Scott MacGregor]

I think we can remove nsIMessengerMigrator.idl from the tree and from the few places that are still including nsIMessengerMigrator.h.

Comment 18

[Scott MacGregor]

In addition to nsIMessengerMigrator, can't we remove import\comm4xProfile & related files? 

Comment 19

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mark, David, open question in comment 18.  

And, I don't have a clear reading of these comments - has import also been dropped from trunk?