Thunderbird:Testing: Difference between revisions

If you can handle some risk**, a fantastic way to help speed development and improve the Thunderbird's quality is to continuously run an [http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/ early release] or [ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.2/ nightly build] and submit bugs for problems that you find. And [http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=29 talking to other nightly users is easy].

'''** Ability to "handle the risk" means you have great backups of your profiles and mail store, and have some tolerance for risk.''' Dataloss is rare, but is a possibility. Stability is amazingly great, but not guaranteed. And fixes to bugs in these builds don't come overnight.  But many people run unsupported builds. Nightlies and some early releases are code named Shredder. Shredder is an unbranded state of Thunderbird code base. Development code eventually ships as a future version, like 3.2.

Some extensions won't work. But many like enigmail and [http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/download.html calendar] work if you use the right download for trunk or nightly. Many work if you override the version check and carefully test. Determine one at a time which work using [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/6543 Nightly Tester Tools extension].  You can also [http://kb.mozillazine.org/Run_multiple_copies_of_Thunderbird_at_the_same_time run the current "production" version of Thunderbird at the same time].

See what fixes have checked in at [http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ comm-central] and watch the changes via [http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/atom-log RSS].  [http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=29 Build forum] is also a good source of information.