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Easy path to source code #238
Description
https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/1pny804/where_is_the_actual_source_code_it_seems_like_the/ makes the point, I think correctly, that it's not trivially easy to get to the source code from any obvious location.
Some possibilities could be:
- https://developer.thunderbird.net/ - but it first presents several preliminaries sections because it currently presumes the person is going to contribute code or documentation
- Thunderbird > Help > About
- Thunderbird > Help > About > Licensing - lacks any pointers to Thunderbird code in the text "All of the source code to this product is available under licenses which are both free and open source. A URL identifying the specific source code used to create this copy can be found on the build configuration page, and you can read instructions on how to download and build the code for yourself."
- Thunderbird Help > Troubleshooting Information > about:buildconfig > yields a link like https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/b1a35f8a7251dada824abd12b4de3b70e2064be1 where you have to know to click on "files".
Activity
wsmwk commentedon Dec 27, 2025
Created Bug 2007817 - Help > About > Licensing points to Firefox developer docs, not Thunderbird related to points 2-4.
hellsworth commentedon Jan 7, 2026
I'm not sure what the best path forward is with regards to DTN because the information of how to get the code is there.
If we want to make the code more visible, just for folks that want to look, we could link directly to https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/comm-central/file or https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/ . I believe this web interface for the code would have been sufficient for the user that reported the issue. Wdyt?
wsmwk commentedon Jan 12, 2026
Pointing to https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/ sounds nice. We could add it at https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/codebase-overview "Overview of Comm Central":
c/The following directories are included in the comm-central repository:/The following directories are included in the comm-central source code repository, searchable at mercurial:/
A couple more suggestions:
Sidebar for when the code comes to github:
wsmwk commentedon Jan 12, 2026
I've asked the user for more feedback at https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/1pny804/comment/nz33rol/
coreycb commentedon Jan 12, 2026
Git will be used by developers and once patches land they will be mirrored to Mercurial, which CI will run against. From a browser, searchfox or github can be used to search code.
Just Github. It'll live at https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-desktop. I have a work in progress for doc updates at:
#240
syntastical commentedon Feb 6, 2026
It would be nice to have a direct link to the source repo in the
contributemenu and in the site map at the very bottom of the home page.