Re: gnome-spidermonkey?

[Frederic Crozat <fred crozat net>]

2010/12/10 Colin Walters <walters verbum org>:
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Frederic Crozat <fred crozat net> wrote:
>>
>> Isn't that what xulrunner package is for ?
>
> xulrunner *is* firefox, literally; the sources are identical.  On
> Fedora at least, Firefox is built using it, which means that if
> there's say a security update for Firefox (which almost certainly is
> really in xulrunner), then xulrunner needs to be updated, which could
> possibly include JSAPI changes.

Which means less maintenance work for distributions.

> Basically, I want us to be decoupled from this; there are conceptually
> actually 4 layers.
>
> NSPR <- spidermonkey <- xulrunner <- firefox
>
> Where "<-" is depends on.  Right now at least Fedora ships like:
>
> NSPR <- (spidermonkey xulrunner firefox)
>
> Where () is "tightly coupled", meaning that gjs and gnome-shell are
> tightly coupled to firefox.
>
> Having a separate xulrunner as a project hasn't really worked - it's a
> *huge*, enormous codebase.  Spidermonkey on the other hand has always
> nominally supported being built seprately; it has its own configure
> script, etc.

Except almost nobody ship spidermonkey that way (I used to package it
separately years ago in Mandrake) but it didn't last long and there
was very few (ie one or two) using it and no maintenance on it by
upstream.

Forking spidermonkey would mean code duplication in distributions and
moreover, library code would not be shared in memory between firefox
and gjs (but I might be wrong on this).

Using xulrunner as a "basis", providing libmozjs.so isn't sufficient ?

-- 
Frederic Crozat