Re: Plans now that Mozilla Suite's being discontinued?

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 11:49:00AM -0500, Adam Hooper wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-18-03 at 15:47 +0000, Nix wrote:
> > On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, Logan Rathbone prattled cheerily:
> > > when built against Firefox, or will you be hoping for Mozilla to finally
> > > pull Gecko out of the Suite as a shared library that you guys could
> > > build against (and distributions could include, etc.)
> > 
> > You mean <http://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php/XUL:Xul_Runner>?
> 
> It may or may not be the same thing re-branded, but what I thought of
> when I heard "pull Gecko out of the suite" is GRE:
> <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/GRE.html>
> 
> GRE and XULRunner might be the same project with a different name. But I
> think GRE doesn't include XUL (which Galeon doesn't use). I don't know
> the status of either project.
>
Yeah, I've heard of both projects (or is it just one thing?) and
admittedly have been confused about whether they are the same thing or
not.  I believe (read: hope) that they are separate; XUL is just an
XML-based interface language -- why should it require Gecko, a webpage
rendering engine?

I really would like to have Galeon installed some day without any trace
of XUL on my computer.  It's not that I'm against XUL or anything --
official Mozilla products have used it with great success -- I'd just
prefer not to have it installed on my computer so I can run my preferred
web browser (Galeon, obviously ;-) which doesn't even need it in theory.

> I know Marco tried to build build Epiphany against GRE about a year ago
> and I think he ended up with something semi-functional. But I'm guessing
> it was excessively hard to work out that final 10% of functionality and
> so he gave up. (This is just a guess, I could be wrong.)
> 
I'm sorry to hear that :-(

I think the Mozilla development has sadly been switched over to Firefox
to such a great extent, that they've had to shift their attention away
from the "development platform" a bit.  In a way I hope the
discontinuation of the Suite will help this -- the people that were
previously working on adding features to the Suite will now hopefully be
delegated to other tasks, like getting XULRunner/GRE well underway..?
(/me crosses his fingers).

> Besides, I'm almost certain that Firefox will never be built against GRE
> (or XULRunner). And since just about every Linux distribution includes
> Firefox by default these days, building Galeon against GRE would only
> *increase* the number of packages needed.
> 
Being a Debian user, I don't see how having a multiple *number of
packages* to be a bad thing.  *However* (and this is a big 'however') if
the overall size of the individual packages outweighs that of a single
package to a great extent, something is wrong.  

Personally I think that when used correctly, multiple packages can make
things more modular.  For instance, if I want to compile a kernel module
on Debian (and some other systems, of course) all I have to do is
install the headers and not the whole source code (which I usually don't
need).  

I think the official builds of Firefox for Windows should
continue being produced the way they are.  Windows users are used to
having multiple instances of the same thing running, anyway.  But the
individual sections should be at least able to be distributed
separately.  I think it would be awesome if when I apt-get installed
'mozilla-firefox' on Debian (clearly an arbitrary distro choice here), 
its dependencies included 'xulrunner' and'gre' (and perhaps even a few 
subsets making things even more modular).

Similarly, when I apt-get install galeon it'd be nice to have it depend
on just 'gre'.  So if I already had mozilla-firefox installed on my
Debian system then evidently I'd already have 'gre' so 'galeon' would
install easily.  I could then uninstall mozilla-firefox and even
xulrunner (but obviously not 'gre') and still keep 'galeon'.  That would
be the best situation IMHO.  But everyone already knows this, and this
shouldn't be new to anyone.  Just thought I'd reiterate the point some
people try to make (but aren't always clear about).

I know this post is more about wishful thinking and less (read: not at
all) about decisive action, but I think it's cool to keep this
discussion out in the open.

-Logan

-- 
Your fortune for the day:
In the first place, God made idiots; this was for practice; then he made
school boards.
		-- Mark Twain

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