Make quickFilters compatible with Thunderbird 78 ESR

[RealRaven2000]

Thunderbird 78 will reject classic Add-ons. For quickFilters to be supported, it must be rewritten as a "mail extension experiment" which is the preparation for next years full on "Mail extension" conversion where all XUL and XPCOM functions have to be replaced with HTML and native API functions (many of which still need to be implemented in the THunderbird core team).

At this moment it is unclear which special restrictions the conversion to "real" mail extensions is going to bring with it - I am liaising with the Thunderbird development team to get as much functionality supported as possible, for next year.

[RealRaven2000]

Me and @opto are currently working on porting QuickFolders to Tb78, quickFilters will follow shortly after.

[RealRaven2000]

Timeline: we intend to be ready by end of September, when 78.2 is auto-rolled out to the Tb68 users base. Please do not upgrade until then.

What happened - @jobisoft helped me and @opto with the first hard conversion step to a mail experiment with QuickFolders. We will finish that one first so that it runs completely with only minor functionality loss. Then we will apply the same changes to quickFilters (similar codebase) and last SmartTemplate⁴.

[RealRaven2000]

making progress with QuickFolders conversion - got some help from @jobisoft yesterday and made a fresh branch at
https://github.com/RealRaven2000/QuickFolders/tree/ESR78-method

[jorchier]

Please notify me of all changes. Thanks ...

[RealRaven2000]

Please notify me of all changes. Thanks ...

Will do! Any activity here will promptly land in your inbox. If you're interested in the ongoing struggle, QuickFolders is the first conversion candidate, see the relevant issue over there. Once done there I will apply the shared code changes to quickFilters and fix the remaining stuff here.

[RealRaven2000]

Still working on the QuickFolders conversion, which is going to my the first fully Tb78 compatible Add-on, I have just created a new code branch to do preparation work for converting quickFilters:

https://github.com/RealRaven2000/quickFilters/tree/ESR78

For conversion steps here, we will be following the new upgrade guide here:

https://github.com/thundernest/addon-developer-support/wiki/Using-the-WindowListener-API-to-convert-a-Legacy-Overlay-WebExtension-into-a-MailExtension-for-Thunderbird-78

Since we will still be using the old XPCOM functions from within the confines of the "Mail extension experiment" framework, we hope to not lose any functionality in this step. The next 12 months can then be used to replace these functions with APIs (some of which still have to be designed and implemented by the Thunderbird Core team) as they become available. There will be separate issues logged for this work.

Thunderbird has also planned a big amount of work removing the old interfaces, see:
https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap
no doubt this may impact on the ESR period for Thunderbird 78; we will deal with the problems caused for us as they occur as usual.

[EpicOrange]

Thank you for your work! posting to watch

[RealRaven2000]

I know there is a lot of interest in this work - we are not quite there yet, still ironing out kinks in QuickFolders - but we will have a version for quickFilters very soon.

For those interested / or also using it, a solid beta for QuickFolders in Tb78 is here.

[alexgogan]

Hi Axel,

Really (REALLY) looking forward to getting this update soon, new pc installed latest version and hundreds of filters cant import >:¬{ oh my inbox!

If I can help with something just ask.

[franzschoeller]

For all who are waiting for update so QF can be used with 78.xx - on 30th september i got information that pre-release shall be available in week 41. So let's hope and see. :)

BR

[RealRaven2000]

Here is the first test version:

https://github.com/RealRaven2000/quickFilters/releases/tag/5.0pre37

please add all bugs here in the thread below... ⬇⬇⬇