This proposal identifies serious legitimate concerns with Thunderbird development going forward, but the proposed solution looks more like a hammer seeking a nail than a thoughtful approach to addressing the concerns.
Yeah, I cringed at the JS thing. Why not do it in Rust and start with some of the Servo code as a base? That would give the developers an intermediate application to work with that doesn't require the full capability of a web browser.
The whole tirade read like a thinly veiled "building an Electron-based MUA is just easier by now", which is a thing I've been contemplating toying with because, to paraphrase another well-known MUA, all those desktop email clients† flat out suck and the best ones are barely above the tolerable threshold.
> Why not do it in Rust and start with some of the Servo code as a base?
Thought about it, but I think Servo might just not be that ready yet given the expected timeframe. Could be of a great synergy and a nice real-life testbed for Servo though.
† I've extensively used a lot on various OSes, from Claws to Gmail (web) to mutt to Mail.app to Eudora to Fastmail (web) to Outlook to AirMail. For none of them could I ever say "nailed it" and while some do have their pluses they're all broken one way or another which brings the whole package down.
(Citation Needed).
This proposal identifies serious legitimate concerns with Thunderbird development going forward, but the proposed solution looks more like a hammer seeking a nail than a thoughtful approach to addressing the concerns.