Post by Moonchild » 2017-02-10, 11:53

First and foremost, it will present a proper, unambiguous compatibility version to extensions, solving installation issues and compatibility headaches.

Second, it will bring the application version in line with the closest compatibility version of Thunderbird it is forked off from, providing a clearer and more logical application front-end numbering there as to what application version of Thunderbird the UI can be considered "closest to". This will be important for e.g. themes and extensions that expect certain specifics in the UI.

FossaMail will still be built on Pale Moon 27 (and therefore Goanna 3) code, but ultimately, that distinction doesn't matter for the actual front-end of things, since any compatibility issues between platform code and application code will be internal.

FossaMail v27 and v38 will be almost exactly the same - we're not "re-basing" or anything of that sort;

Announcing this ahead of time to avoid confusion for our FossaMail users and prevent the predictable question "Why this version jump?"This is done for a number of reasons:Of note:the only difference will be the version number presented to the world, primarily for extension compatibility.The alternative would have been to make special considerations in the toolkit code to add another dual-version and/or dual-GUID setup like the one present for Pale Moon, but considering FossaMail is actually not as diverted from Thunderbird in the application code (especially with the recent update for v27) going through that would simply make things unnecessarily complex and having potential bugs and discrepanciesthat would just be a headache for users and developers alike. Instead, choosing to "K.I.S.S." it seems to be the better choice.This will also be a one-time deal, as there is no reason whatsoever to consider re-doing the front-end again in the future.[1] e.g.: Extensions may check application versions in their JavaScript which would give conflicting results if it receives "v27" back while the installation procedure indicated "v38".