Re: Thunderbird backend project: finished, call for testing

["Pierre Östlund" <pierre ostlund gmail com>]

I just figured out how work around the need for external libraries/tools needed to build the extension this morning. So, from revision 3843 there's no need to install any extra development packages as they are no longer needed. Just wanted to fill you guys in on this :-)

The changes made could possibly break something as they were quite extensive. I think I covered everything but it's very easy to miss slightest update needed, so look out for anything suspicious.

Thanks!

Pierre Östlund

On 8/6/07, Pierre Östlund <pierre ostlund gmail com> wrote:

On 8/6/07, Joe Shaw <joe joeshaw org> wrote:

After I sent the original email I just changed
"mozilla-thunderbird-xpcom" in the configure.in to "xulrunner-xpcom"
and things built and ran fine.  So I think that the IDL files needed
aren't necessarily Thunderbird-specific, they'll work against any
Mozilla-based product.  How much those interfaces change between
products and between versions, I have no idea.

Oh yeah... Funny thing about .idl here which I just recalled. When I first started playing around with the IDL language I used the #include directive to include .idl files with stuff that I needed (the nsIMsgDBHdr interface for instance). It turned out that this didn't work well at all. It seemed like Thunderbird didn't identify types correctly in _javascript_ and I just kept getting exceptions thrown at me. I then changed to simple forward declarations instead and after that everything worked well. So I guess that the dependency disappeared after that.

The mozilla base is the same for all mozilla products but different products obviously add additional support for things needed. I have not idea what's the base and what's not though.

Do you know specifically what IDL files are required?  Or is it just
the xpidl tool?

The only interface needed is the nsISupports, so we basically only need the xpidl tool and the nsISupports.idl file to build the extension. If that files requires anything else I can't tell as I don't know.

Thanks!

Pierre Östlund