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Test Day November 14, 2008

Test days are done to stress test specific features in a development version of Thunderbird, to identify its strengths and weaknesses. This test day we stress test new features prior to freezing the code which will later ship as Thunderbird 3 beta 1 (3.0b1).

We encourage you to participate, however be advised that we are testing with nightly builds. These have not yet gone through quality (QA) testing. Use at your own risk and protect your mail, data and profile with appropriate backups. On the positive side, several relatively stable version 3 early releases have been issued, and many people successfully use nightly builds on a daily basis without major problems or dataloss.

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Prepare

Protect your data and consider using a test profile to avoid potential dataloss.

Focus and Testing

Gloda (global database) is an indexer and database, the backend to major improvements to come in search capability, data aggregation and visualization, and productivity. Gloda works in the background, and is a layer on top of (not a replacement for) the existing folder-centric message storage mechanism. Non-RDF folder pane provides backend improvements for future improvements to the folder pane, and also allows extensions to access and modify the folder pane more easily. The testday goals for Gloda and non-RDF are to check for regressions. Threaded cross-folder views provides a long awaited capability to do grouping and threading in saved search views that span multiple folders.

Using nightly build dated 11/14, test as follows:

• Gloda (global database)
  1. Turn on gloda using instructions at Thunderbird:Using Gloda. (Gloda is off by default)
  2. Gloda indexing works in the background**. Keep it turned on so that it indexes during your normal usage of Thunderbird. Test the following while indexing is in progress:
     • Compose with spell check turned on
     • Search
     • Compact
     • Switching mail folders, and newsgroups
     • Scrolling messages, thread and folder panes
     • Navigating through messages in a folder
  3. Please let us know if something looks or feels awfully wrong, primarily in terms of your computer's performance during indexing. There are currently no new UI features which you can test or report about.

** Gloda indexing make take a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the size 
   of your message store, machine speed, and the amount of activity on your 
   computer. It is OK to shut down thunderbird or your computer while indexing  
   is in progress - gloda will resume indexing where the shutdown ended.

• Non-RDF folder pane (bug 414038)
  • Please report any stability issues, and problems in context menu and File menu functions. In particular, that adding/modifying/deleting folders properly updates the pane.
  • Note: The new pane is not finished, so what you see may not exactly match the older pane. For example column information may no exist and on first startup accounts may be collapsed. Also toolbar folder picker and mail.showFolderPaneColumns will no longer work.

• Threaded cross-folder views (enabled by bug 379806)
  1. Create various search views that use multiple folders, from search messages > save as search folder.
  2. Test various combinations of sorting, threading and grouping.
  3. Test actions (mark, delete, read, unread) involving single and multiple messages to ensure they work within the view, and also that the changes are correctly reflected in the proper base folders.
  4. Set new bugs reported to block bug 379806.

How to provide feedback

Both negative and positive feedback will be helpful. Please be clear, complete and specific in your descriptions. Choices:

• File a new bug
• #thunderbird channel on mozilla irc
• Hendrix feedback web form (no account needed)

Help and Tips

Ask for help on IRC in #thunderbird if you need assistance. See the Testdays page for information about IRC and other test day information.

Other ways you can help

See Getting Involved and Thunderbird:Testing for other ways you can help with Thunderbird. See Thunderbird:Home for information about the future of Thunderbird.

Thanks

Thank you helping today. We appreciate you taking the time to participate in the open source development process, and for helping to improve Thunderbird