Penelope development progress

Penelope, a project announced last year that aims to turn Eudora into a Thunderbird based application has been in the works and on track to release its first milestone, version 0.1 by the end of February.

I talked to Mark Charlebois, a core member of Penelope’s development team to learn more about the project, its goals and development.

He starts clarifying on what can users expect from Penelope in the mid and long term:
“There will be a completely open source version called Penelope and an official, branded version from Qualcomm called Eudora. This is similar to the Bon Echo/Firefox naming that exists for the open source vs officially branded builds. The 0.1 release will be an extension but will also require some changes to the main Thunderbird codeline to support
Eudora features. We are architecting the Penelope code base to be similar to Lightning. It is an extension that is built as part of the target at compile time.”

As stated in the roadmap, version 0.1, currently in Alpha 12, is focused on providing minimum functionality and user interface so Eudora users can feel comfortable using it. This includes toolbar icons, basic settings and shortcut keys. The screenshot below shows Thunderbird 2 Beta 2 (Thunderbird 1.5.x is not supported) with the Penelope extension installed and enabled.

Regarding the featureset differences between Thunderbird and Eudora, Mark explains: “We have some initial plans for what features will make it into particular releases based on the complexity of those features and the data we have about which features are most frequently used by Eudora users.”

“It is our intent to put a bug in bugzilla for each feature that will be added to Penelope and assign it to a particular milestone release. If someone’s favorite Eudora feature doesn’t have a bug associated with it they are certainly welcome to create one and our team will assign it to the appropritate release.”

“Bugzilla also has a voting system for bugs and we take this as input into the demand for a particular feature.”

Penelope is to some degree a cultural challenge as well as it requires the interaction of commercial and open source development teams, on this, Mark tells “it took a while to get the integration going, but we have had good communication with the Thunderbird folks and they have been very helpful with our questions on the Thunderbird architecture.”

There is no firm date for Penelope 1.0 release but you can follow its development and the Eudora forums and the Mozilla Wiki.