Can someone please explain to me the difference between the firefox nightly downloads, Mozilla 1.8, Aviary 1.0.1 & the trunk versions?
Okay, at the heart of it all is the trunk. This is where active development goes on. And even though there is no longer a stand-alone product being developed as "Mozilla", the trunk is currently working its way up to Mozilla 1.9, numbering back incrementally all the way to 0.6 (at the time of Netscape 6).
From the trunk, every so often (less frequently in the last two years) branches are cut. These branches are the 1.x branches, and from them the stable releases are created. Currently we have the 1.7 branch as the long-lived stable-branch (MoFo is committed to keeping its builds from this branch updated with security fixes for a while yet, while not changing its functionality). Mozilla 1.7.11 and this release, Firefox 1.0.7, are made from this branch. Also expect upcoming Thunderbird 1.0.7 and Mozilla 1.7.12 releases.
The Aviary 1.0 branch is basically the same as the Mozilla 1.7 branch, but is referred to specifically when talking about Firefox and Thunderbird. (It's more a CVS branch tag than something you should know about.)
Then, only recently, the 1.8 branch was created. A number of must-fix bugs still present on this branch have been identified, and these are currently being worked on. Once that's all done, Firefox 1.5, Thunderbird 1.5 and SeaMonkey 1.0 (the successor to the Mozilla application suite) will be released from it.
Deer Park 1.5 Beta 1 and SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha were releases from this newly formed 1.8 branch, to show what is being worked toward.
It's likely that version numbers of all products/projects will converge at 2.0 in 1-2 years - although this might come after Mozilla 1.7.11 or thereabouts, depending on the necessary functionality specified for Mozilla/Gecko 2.0 (so based on what the backend needs, not frontend functionality).
Of course, it's just as likely that this won't happen. I'd bet MoFo itself doesn't know yet. They're not all that good at planning ahead.:)
Kids, Atom's not new. It's been developed by lots of smart folks.
Version 1.0 is new however. It's only been 'released' a couple of days ago, and still needs to go through some formalities before becoming an official standard.
That said, none of the parts that Firefox uses have 'changed' between 0.3 and 1.0 (that is, there's a new namespace, and a new required element, but I assume Firefox is liberal enough in what it accepts not to be troubled by this), so it should all just work out of the box.
Thunderbird might be another issue, what with renaming <modified> to <updated> and <issued> to <published>
As someone who's implemented them both
on
Atom 1.0 vs RSS 2.0
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· Score: 4, Informative
Atom wins hands-down. Things are actually well specified.
I can just walk through the atom specification, implementing it as I go, and not have any questions about what is required, what type of content can be present in any one element, I don't have to look up five even less well-specified different modules just to get the basics of the feed together (and thus also don't have to worry about namespaces), what elements and attributes mean (actually, I spent a minor five minutes agonizing over what I should put in the term atribute of the category element, given that the label attribute contains the human readable version, before realizing that I was completely free in this, as the "scheme" os up to myself, and deciding to mirror how categories are named in the url on the website (which I found to be consistent with various other already existing atom 1.0 feeds that I checked)), or... well, basically any kind of question that you need to think about as you implement a new and previously unknown specification.
RSS on the other hand (any of the 9 incompatible versions)... *shudders* Those specifications don't tell me anything. I copy/paste from other feeds and heavily use the feedvalidator, but... *shakes his head*
Once all feedreaders have been updated to support Atom 1.0 completely, I'll go and pull the plug on the remaining RSS feeds, and good riddance too!
Although I completely agree with the parent that ZDNet articles are worse than useless, there has been recent discussion on the debian mailinglist. Don't know why it's not in google yet (too recent), but the thread on debian-devel starts here.
Slashdot Mirror
From the trunk, every so often (less frequently in the last two years) branches are cut. These branches are the 1.x branches, and from them the stable releases are created. Currently we have the 1.7 branch as the long-lived stable-branch (MoFo is committed to keeping its builds from this branch updated with security fixes for a while yet, while not changing its functionality). Mozilla 1.7.11 and this release, Firefox 1.0.7, are made from this branch. Also expect upcoming Thunderbird 1.0.7 and Mozilla 1.7.12 releases.
The Aviary 1.0 branch is basically the same as the Mozilla 1.7 branch, but is referred to specifically when talking about Firefox and Thunderbird. (It's more a CVS branch tag than something you should know about.)
Then, only recently, the 1.8 branch was created. A number of must-fix bugs still present on this branch have been identified, and these are currently being worked on. Once that's all done, Firefox 1.5, Thunderbird 1.5 and SeaMonkey 1.0 (the successor to the Mozilla application suite) will be released from it.
Deer Park 1.5 Beta 1 and SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha were releases from this newly formed 1.8 branch, to show what is being worked toward.
It's likely that version numbers of all products/projects will converge at 2.0 in 1-2 years - although this might come after Mozilla 1.7.11 or thereabouts, depending on the necessary functionality specified for Mozilla/Gecko 2.0 (so based on what the backend needs, not frontend functionality).
Of course, it's just as likely that this won't happen. I'd bet MoFo itself doesn't know yet. They're not all that good at planning ahead.
Version 1.0 is new however. It's only been 'released' a couple of days ago, and still needs to go through some formalities before becoming an official standard.
That said, none of the parts that Firefox uses have 'changed' between 0.3 and 1.0 (that is, there's a new namespace, and a new required element, but I assume Firefox is liberal enough in what it accepts not to be troubled by this), so it should all just work out of the box.
Thunderbird might be another issue, what with renaming <modified> to <updated> and <issued> to <published>
Atom wins hands-down. Things are actually well specified .
I can just walk through the atom specification, implementing it as I go, and not have any questions about what is required, what type of content can be present in any one element, I don't have to look up five even less well-specified different modules just to get the basics of the feed together (and thus also don't have to worry about namespaces), what elements and attributes mean (actually, I spent a minor five minutes agonizing over what I should put in the term atribute of the category element, given that the label attribute contains the human readable version, before realizing that I was completely free in this, as the "scheme" os up to myself, and deciding to mirror how categories are named in the url on the website (which I found to be consistent with various other already existing atom 1.0 feeds that I checked)), or... well, basically any kind of question that you need to think about as you implement a new and previously unknown specification.
RSS on the other hand (any of the 9 incompatible versions)... *shudders* Those specifications don't tell me anything. I copy/paste from other feeds and heavily use the feedvalidator, but... *shakes his head*
Once all feedreaders have been updated to support Atom 1.0 completely, I'll go and pull the plug on the remaining RSS feeds, and good riddance too!
Although I completely agree with the parent that ZDNet articles are worse than useless, there has been recent discussion on the debian mailinglist. Don't know why it's not in google yet (too recent), but the thread on debian-devel starts here.