I think that grouping the daily threads by week still makes sense given that there may be rather active weeks which a lot of specific things to discuss rather than those getting lost in a 40/50-page thread. Yes, there certainly are weeks where not much is happening other than listing the checkins of the day.
All of course assuming that the effort of rotating the thread is ok with JoeS as its maintainer...
smsmith wrote:So, my Daily build claims to be version 19 alpha whatever. In light of the Thunderbird going into maintenance mode and features landing if the community gets involved announcement, is it worth my time and effort any more to keep up with the daily build, or would I be better off just installing Tb 17 release when it comes out in the next couple of weeks (month)?
Think of it more like the old trunk/release-branch system. Yes, releases are coming from 17.0.x ESR as the basis (possibly with a 17.1.x intermediate branch with a couple of features, that was part of a discussion some time back, but will have to be seen if it's done), but primary development will follow the aurora and beta channels with betas coming up once a cycle initially.
The main reason for using either daily or aurora builds is to catch regressions early, so that purpose is still the same as it was prior to the 5.0 change in the release scheme (and those can easily sneak in by changes on mozilla-central or as side effects of comm-central related bugs). The earlier such MailNews regressions are caught and dealt with the better, thus no need to wait until the 24.0 cycle which would become the next ESR branch.
As for feature development, it will have to be seen to which extent the community will catch the loss of resources devoted by the paid developers (on the other hand, SeaMonkey has been doing a good job with community-based development and also has a couple of strong MailNews developers, thus I wouldn't be too pessimistic here).
