The roads I take...

As reported a few times in the last week, comm-central has been created as the new repository to host Thunderbird and SeaMonkey (and later Sunbird/Lightning) code on Mercurial and build it with the Mozilla 1.9.1 platform, on which SeaMonkey 2 and Thunderbird 3 will be based.

We populated the repository with code this Tuesday and since worked on getting our build and test boxes in shape so they build and test the new development trees.

The Thunderbird boxes are all green now and have nightlies, the SeaMonkey boxes build fine, but the testers are trying to do a lot more tests than the Thunderbird ones and so are running into a small number of problems still, mainly leaks in running mochitests, but also a unit test failure and a reftest failure on Mac, which we are still investigating.

Despite that, we are confident that development can be made somewhat reliably on top of this and so we opened comm-central for development for the first time now!

Please read MDC documentation on comm-central and the related documents linked there before doing active work with this.

But remember, cvs is dead in terms of active Thunderbird or SeaMonkey development!

There's a new Mercurial repository in town!

Reed just created http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ - which is where Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, and later also calendar will live in the future.

The repository is empty for now, and will stay this way at least until shortly after Thunderbird/Shredder 3.0a2, code for which should be frozen on Tuesday. Calendar code will join even later than Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, we'll wait until after Sunbird/Lighting 0.9 for that, which will be the last release that supports 1.8 branch code. In the future, all our project will be focused on comm-central and based on Mozilla 1.9.1, we'll skip 1.9.0 completely from a release Point of view.

Until we switch, tracked by bug 437643, there are still some bugs to fix - we need some slight changes on mozilla-central, which are waiting for review, calendar code needs a few small changes so we can pull it in from CVS and build Lighting with Thunderbird (also waiting for review), and our build code changes need review, I'll reach out for that soon.
Of course, we still can need all the testing we can get on building the test repository, please report any problems to me, I'll try to fix them. I'm also already trying to get build machines up for SeaMonkey so we'll still have nightlies. And I have not yet tried all test suites, I only know we run unit tests as well as before.

All in all, a numbers of things are still to be done, but we are on track for switching to Mercurial soon!