If you look at the latest release you will notice that it's Thunderbird 17.0.2 rather than the 18.0 you may have expected (and which was the number of the latest beta pre-release).
Thunderbird 17.0.2 contains 20 fixes for known security vulnerabilities and various other bug fixes, but no new features. The reason is that Mozilla has changed the release scheme for Thunderbird (i.e., Firefox and SeaMonkey will stick with the rapid-release 6-week interval scheme) and returned to a quasi-branch scheme again which was in place for 3.x and earlier. Thus, 17.0.x releases will come for a period of about 42 weeks until 24.0 is reached which will include new features accumulated until that cycle. Then, a new 24.0.x branch is opened for another 42 weeks, etc. Beta releases will continue to be current with feature developments and numbered by the respective cycle (19.0 beta, 20.0 beta, etc.).
As a consequence, new features will hopefully be more mature before they hit the releases, thus related bugs and regressions sufficiently fixed. The stable interfaces should also avoid issues with extension updates and custom-style modifications. There may be an intermediate 17.1 release to catch new features considered important, but that's hypothetical at this time and not planned.
This switch was also introduced due to an organizational change within Mozilla, which reduced the commitment of paid developers to Thunderbird and Mail/News Core development substantially, expecting the community to take over much of the feature development. Security and stability fixes will still be provided by Mozilla itself. That's in essence the status where SeaMonkey has been for years now (and rather successfully), thus no reason to panic.
See viewtopic.php?f=29&t=2033027 for more details on the rapid-release model and the extended-support releases.
Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
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Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
Last edited by tanstaafl on January 16th, 2013, 4:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Changed from "never ending" to 21 days. Tanstaafl
Reason: Changed from "never ending" to 21 days. Tanstaafl
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Re: Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
See Thunderbird New Release and Governance Model and Thunderbird Stability and Community Innovation for more information.
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Re: Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
Do I need to manually update Thunderbird ESR from 17.0 to 17.0.2?
Need updates for tb17 esrs
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=827458
Thunderbird 17.0.2esr build notes
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Thund ... BuildNotes
Need updates for tb17 esrs
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=827458
Thunderbird 17.0.2esr build notes
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Thund ... BuildNotes
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Re: Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
Good question, I'm not sure how to read that. My 10.0.11 ESR updated to 10.0.12 as intended, thus it appears that the updates haven't been included in the 17.0 ESR process given that this was the first update on that branch (17.0.1 was skipped by Thunderbird).
You can wait another day and try then to update manually from the Help > About menu, or download a fresh installer from http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/organizations which shows 17.0.2 ESR already if that doesn't work.
There should be one more update on 10.0 ESR parallel to the 19.0 cycle, then those users should be brought to 17.0 ESR with the next (20.0 cycle) update.
You can wait another day and try then to update manually from the Help > About menu, or download a fresh installer from http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/organizations which shows 17.0.2 ESR already if that doesn't work.
There should be one more update on 10.0 ESR parallel to the 19.0 cycle, then those users should be brought to 17.0 ESR with the next (20.0 cycle) update.
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Re: Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
Official response in the bug report you've mentioned:
Ben Hearsum wrote:At this time, users can updated manually with the installer. When the 17.0.3 ESR is built, it will include updates for 17.0 and 17.0.2 ESR users.
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Re: Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
Thanks, rsx11m. I will update manually with the installer.
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Re: Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
You are welcome.
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Re: Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
Well I've got TB18.0 + Lightning 1.9 on my linux installation but on Win XP, TB17 has just updated to 17.0.2
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Re: Why no Thunderbird 18.0 release?
That's either the 18.0 beta pre-release version then, or your distribution made their own builds from tags other than THUNDERBIRD_17_0_2_RELEASE in the comm-release/mozilla-release repositories (17.0.2 is a branch before the 18.0 changes were merged in), by accident or on purpose (there is no tagged 18.0 release version in the repositories they could have pulled).