Re: Mozilla successes.

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Tom and Esther, Luke,

There are fundamentally three reasons why Sun's Mozilla accessibility 
improvements, unlike Sun's GNOME accessibility improvements, aren't going 
immediately into Mozilla head:

 1. Sun will ship an earlier branch of Mozilla in our upcoming Solaris
    and JDS/Linux distributions than community head.  As we are making
    these accessibility improvements in significant measure so we can
    deliver them to our customers, those improvements happen first on
    our own branch, and then get migrated to Mozilla head.  Numerous
    differences between our branch and head (including those unrelated
    to accessibility) mean that in many cases the patches need to be
    modified in order to move to Mozilla head - a process that takes
    some time/work for each patch.

 2. The Mozilla bug patch process involves more code review than the GNOME
    bug patch process.  While we have the eager cooperation of the
    module maintainer for accessibility in Mozilla (Aaron Leventhal), there
    is additional review that is needed.  Furthermore, many of the
    accessibility bug fixes (especially those involving accessibility API
    support [e.g. ATK implementation]) touch *lots* of files, which makes
    the review process more time-consuming.  Given that many ATK bug
    fixes touch the same many files, we've been asked to batch these
    together to be reviewed in chunks (rather than each individual change
    at a time).

 3. The Sun engineers on this project - our Sun Beijing Mozilla team - are
    *very* pressed at the moment working hard to get a couple of releases
    out the door in order to meet upcoming Sun releases.  Given the amount of
    accessibility support we want to see in these releases, and the number
    of outstanding bugs we're furiously trying to fix, in just the last
    bunch of weeks we've pulled back from submitting patches to Mozilla
    trunk for review (we're also late getting out an updated Mozilla
    keyboard navigation proposal, for the same reason).

All of this should get better soon (after the internal crunch ends), 
especially given the enthusiastic offer of assistance we've gotten from the 
Mozilla accessibility maintainer in getting these patches/fixes into Mozilla 
trunk.


Regards,


Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team



Tom and Esther Ward wrote:
> Hi, I would be interested as well to know why it is taking so long for the
> changes to get in to the main Mozilla trunk.
> I know of VI users interested in trying Gnome, but don't wan't to go through
> the hastle of compiling the Sun accessibility builds or download instal
> another Mozilla. They would just like to install the stock one off of Fedora
> and be done with it.
> I of course, for the time being probably could put together an rpm of the
> latest November stable  Sun Mozilla build, but
> still  they do have a point.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Luke Yelavich" <linuxaccess themuso com>
> To: "Peter Korn" <Peter Korn Sun COM>
> Cc: "Tom and Esther Ward" <tward1978 earthlink net>;
> <mozilla-accessibility mozilla org>; <gnome-accessibility-list gnome org>
> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 5:18 PM
> Subject: Re: Mozilla successes.
>
>
>
> > On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 07:02:17AM EST, Peter Korn wrote:
> >
> > > I'm delighted to hear of your successes.  Thank you for the report of
> > > problems with the Sun Java download page; we'll look into it.
> >
> > I will have to chekc this out myself. I like the sound of what you had
> > to say Tom.
> >
> >
> > > We are working to integrate all of our bug fixes into Mozilla trunk, but
> > > that process is unfortunately a bit slower than we'd like.  Meanwhile, I
> > > encourage you (and everyone else who is interested) to try the
> semi-weekly
>
> > > uploads of the Sun Mozilla builds, and share with us the results of your
> > > explorations. We are very keen to hear user experiences (and especially
> any
>
> > > bugs that you find).
> >
> > A question. Why weren't these bugfixes pushed upstream from the
> > very beginning? or if they were, why have they not gone in nearly as
> > quickly?
> >
> > Luke
> > _______________________________________________
> > mozilla-accessibility mailing list
> > mozilla-accessibility mozilla org
> > http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-accessibility