I thought this was pretty special in its own right, so I'm posting it in its entirety here as a special editorial by the BeZilla Team. Also see this other forum thread.

Please read on, and consider how you can get involved.

To all members of the great BeOS community,

With the recent departure of Paul Ashford from the community in general and the BeZilla project in particular, there have been some changes with the BeOS port of Mozilla.

The good news is that the crisis caused by Paul leaving is partially over, and we have a small but quite creative team working hard on the BeOS port of this vital piece of software. However the bad news is that in the official sense, the BeOS port is still in limbo.

So what exactly is the problem?

The problem is that besides development tasks such as creating new code and fixing bugs, being part of a big multiplatform project such as Mozilla requires a continuous automated compilation and testing process. This process must continue 24/7, to give anybody commiting a change to any part of Mozilla confirmation that the BeOS port still builds and runs correctly after the change.

Obviously, this task cannot be carried out by the developers' own machines - they are in use for the development process itself and millions of other tasks. Therefore dedicated machines are required - mozilla.org has many of these with different setups carrying this continuous build/run cycle on the code, called "tinderboxes".

The current BeOS tinderbox is placed at mozilla.org but it is old, slow, and dying. Now it seems to be down more often than not, and that can lead to many problems. A lot of time has been spent recently fixing build bustage in the BeOS port, and without a tinderbox it is very difficult to find which change caused the breakage. Consider that Mozilla consists of 50,000 source files, and that many changes are made to different areas of the code every day, and it becomes clear why having a regular log of builds made every hour or so can be very helpful.

Edward Dore has volunteered to take on the less creative but no less important work of maintaining the bezilla.org web site, and looking after BeOS builds including the tinderbox.

Unfortunately, he doesn't have a machine to send to mozilla.org to replace the current tinderbox that is nearing the end of its useful life. Ideally, we would like separate tiderboxes for several tasks - e.g. separate boxes for Firefox and Mozilla, and for netserver and BONE/Zeta builds. However even a single new Mozilla-netserver machine will be a big help in getting our port recognised as officially alive.

As well as being a useful tool for the developers the tinderbox machine also provides the nightly builds hosted at mozilla.org. This means that when fixes are commited to the tree, users can test them out the next day without one of the development team having to waste time reconfiguring their setup to create a release build. Also a regular flow of nightly builds will help the people at mozilla.org realise that the BeOS port is still alive and in active development.

As there are no companies making big money out of BeOS at the moment, we are forced to ask the community for donations. It is not just about money, but rather about computer parts required for buiding at least one new tinderbox. The machines should ideally be fairly powerful, as compiling mozilla takes a long time even on fast hardware (over an hour on a fast Athlon XP), and the more frequently builds are produced, the more useful the tinderbox is.

A good browser is one of the most important pieces of software for any modern platform. We are sure that anyone who has used one of the latest builds of Mozilla or Firefox on BeOS will agree that the port is steadily improving, and we have many more improvements lined up for the future. A new tinderbox would really help our development, and would also confirm that the BeOS port is still alive to the people in charge at mozilla.org. We hope you can help us to further improve the only truly modern browser available on BeOS.

Regards,
BeZilla Development Team.