Ask HN: What are you working on tonight? 16 years ago
As part of writing my first Thunderbird addon, started in the way I usually do by doing a demo. Setting up the parallel dev profile was a little tedious and is not explained in the documentation. I wanted to get actual messages into the dev version (because I'll need them) and ended up flying blind (but correctly) by simply copying the right files from out of the default profile into dev.
The exercise itself was very fast - which was nice. There were a number of places where one could go subtly wrong and I managed to miss them all and at the first pass. Which was even more encouraging.
Now I have to grit my teeth a bit and dig into the Thunderbird API to accomplish my real goal. What I do now know is the landscape.