The Firefox and Toolkit modules together cover a large amount of code encompassing the entire front-end of Firefox as well as numerous services that are used by external projects, notably Thunderbird. For a while now both modules have been owned by me with identical peer lists. We have also had a flat structure, no specific sub-modules for different areas of the code.
This has caused a couple of challenges the main one being that from the outside no-one really knows who is responsible for what and who to send patches to for review, a few popular peers tend to get most of the review requests. A secondary issue is that gaining peership over all of Firefox and Toolkit imposed a larger barrier than necessary for most potential reviewers. I'd like to make three changes to these modules: 1. Rename the Firefox module to Desktop Firefox. We ship multiple products called Firefox, this module is specific to the desktop version. 2. Split the module up into a number of sub-modules with defined owners and peers responsible for that area of code leaving a few top-level peers able to review code that cuts across modules or doesn't fall into the list of sub-modules. The list of initial sub-modules is here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mossop:NewModule <https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mossop:NewModule> (the owners are correct, the list of peers needs some work). This list is not expected to be final, I probably missed a few things and over time we’ll add more as needed. The expectation is that the sub-module owners will be free to update the list of their peers whenever they like. 3. Since the modules cover such a large area of code I'd like to add a joint-module owner to share the responsibility. There are many engineers who know the code well enough but Gijs Kruitbosch has consistently been thinking globally about how we implement and maintain features throughout the desktop code. You’ll note that the Toolkit module is light on sub-modules. There are many features that have backend pieces in Toolkit and front-end pieces in Desktop Firefox. Features like Bookmarks and History, Downloads, Password Manager. These sub-modules largely exist in service to the desktop product and as such are maintained by desktop engineers, so I felt it was appropriate to just list them once under Desktop Firefox. Please let me know if you have objections to this plan. Due to the size of the changes I’m going to wait two weeks and then if there are no significant objections I will update the module pages. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
