The roads I take...

You might already have read about the release of Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 - maybe you even remember my earlier posts about SeaMonkey 2 and Lightning. And now here's the good news, right from the announcement the calendar team made:

You can install Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 from AMO and manage your calendars now directly from within the SeaMonkey Mail & Newsgroups component.

We have been working closely with the calendar team to make Lightning work as well as possible within SeaMonkey, but we're also sure things can be improved further, and any help is appreciated.
Also, both the SeaMonkey and calendar teams appreciate testing of this Beta and reporting bugs, so we can make your calendaring experience with SeaMonkey and Lightning even better in the future!

I've seen a stream of new comments on my older SeaMonkey and Lightning Calendar" post, so I think I should provide you with a bit of an insight of where we are with this now - after all the official SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 announcement mentions Lightning.

The good news is that you actually can install current Lightning 1.0pre nightlies in SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 and above and you will get a lot of calendaring functionality right in your suite install.

The bad news is that not everything works yet, see the open Lightning-SeaMonkey integration bugs for an overview.

The most notable problems are the invitation feature not working and no access to Lightning preferences.

We are working on solution for both of those and more, some work needs to be done in SeaMonkey code, some in Lightning code, but patches are coming up and we hope to have at least our side, hopefully also their side, fixed when we ship release candidates for SeaMonkey 2.0 and even more the release itself.

Note that all the general points I raised in the original blog post on this topic are still true, neither official Lightning releases with SeaMonkey support nor shipping SeaMonkey with this calendering functionality by default are planned right now, it's all about making it possible at all to install Lightning at all and making it work well enough that people can test that combination more thoroughly.

A few minutes ago, I landed the calendar code on comm-central for bug 455727.

This means that Lightning and Sunbird are moving to hg trunk development soon and that next to SeaMonkey and Thunderbird, Sunbird is the third application to be built from this community and communication repository.

Let's give the calendar people a warm welcome - we're looking forward to a good time of joint forces here!

Yes, what the recent Calendar blog post says is true: I did enable the Lightning Calendar to be built with SeaMonkey.

But be warned: NO, it DOESN'T WORK - currently, at least.

Recently, when the way of integrating Lightning with Thunderbird has been changed, the integration with SeaMonkey broke heavily and we still need to work on fixing that.

There are a few other things to be aware of as well:

• Lighting does NOT work with SeaMonkey 1.x and never will. The Calendar team is very small and working on huge tasks (pun somewhat intended), so they needed to stop supporting the old, obsolete xpfe toolkit we are using in SeaMonkey 1.x - there is a privately maintained port of the old calendar extension that is said to work with SeaMonkey 1.x in the meantime.
  The work for making Lightning work with SeaMonkey does only affect the development "trunk" and SeaMonkey 2.
• Lightning is not at the moment planning to do any official release with SeaMonkey support at this point. Currently, Sunbird and Lightning releases are still done from and for the 1.8 branch to support Thunderbird 2.0 as well as possible, trunk support is some kind of a stepchild to the calendar team until Thunderbird 3 gets worth supporting.
• Someone needs to work on SeaMonkey-Lightning integration. While some members of the calendar team are eager to see additional users and testers due to SeaMonkey support, it's clear that their team is unable to work on Lightning's SeaMonkey integration themselves. We need to find someone from the SeaMonkey side, ideally someone strongly interested in calendaring support for SeaMonkey, to make this working and keep it going. I'm sure they'll accept patches though, esp. if someone comes up who wants to maintain that integration permanently. There's a special Bugzilla component in the Calendar product that deals with this integration now.
• The calendar team doesn't accept SeaMonkey-only bugs. If you encounter a bug with Lightning withing SeaMonkey, go and test if you see this in Sunbird and Thunderbird+Lightning before reporting it in Bugzilla. The calendar team can't work on SeaMonkey-specific issues at the moment and won't care too much for those. If the bug is about how Lightning integrates with SeaMonkey, feel free to report it in the specific component we now have for that, but don't expect someone to work on it. As I said, we are still looking for someone to work on this.
• We have no firm plans or decisions to ship Lightning with SeaMonkey yet. Even this is an interesting option for the future, we first need to see how well it works and if we can find someone working on the integration before seriously talking about this.

All that said, we are happy we can cooperate with the calendar project to get some kind of calendaring support for future SeaMonkey versions, as this is a frequently requested feature and an interesting prospect for addition to our suite. Still, there's lots of work to do and lots of experience to gather - we'll see how this all works out.

Thanks to the calendar team for enabling us to work with them on this.
And if you are interested in good integration of Lightning with SeaMonkey and willing to work on patches and maintaining them - we are looking for you!