[gentoo-dev] [RFC] net-libs/xulrunner-1.9 slotting or not?

["Raúl Porcel" <armin76@gentoo.org>]

Okay, so here's the thing: Firefox 3 will be released probably some time 
during this year, as you probably know, they released a few days ago 
beta4 and beta5 will be out probably at the start of the next month or 
so. I started doing ebuilds for net-libs/xulrunner-1.9 and 
www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.0 in the mozilla overlay [1] since november 
2007, mainly thanks to Gergan Penkov's patches on his overlay, info 
available on the forums [2], which i've been adjusting them to do static 
releases and not livecvs ebuilds like he does.

So, firefox-3, seamonkey-2, thunderbird-3 and other mozilla products 
will be using xulrunner-1.9, which is the codebase the mozilla products 
are based on. In fact, everytime you emerge any of those apps, you're 
compiling xulrunner, which takes 90% of the time to build. The good 
thing about those new versions, is that they'll be capable of using the 
xulrunner library installed of the system. So you only have to build 
xulrunner once, and you could build firefox-3, seamonkey-2, 
thunderbird-3 against it, and firefox-3 takes less than two minutes to 
build with shared xulrunner.

Since firefox-3 seems usable now, i was thinking on adding it to the 
tree, however that'll need to add net-libs/xulrunner-1.9. Some apps use 
xulrunner at the moment[3], instead of building against firefox or 
thunderbird or seamonkey. Xulrunner is not mandatory to build firefox-3, 
in fact you can build firefox only with the current ebuilds in the overlay.

Xulrunner-1.9 is a big change, and the apps using it won't work until 
they are fixed. So this needs to be decided, i've been working on 
slotting xulrunner, and i'm ready to put it in the tree. However i'd 
like to see what developers(since they will be the ones who will have to 
deal with this) and users prefer. Even if an app is compatible with 
xulrunner-1.9, it will have to be patched if we slot xulrunner. Since 
the pkgconfig files for xulrunner-1.9 are renamed to avoid collisions 
with current xulrunner-1.8.
The other approach would be not slotting it, p.mask xulrunner-1.9 and 
wait until all the packages work against it and then unmask.
That's what i would like to hear opinions about. Should we slot it, or 
should we not slot it and wait until all the apps are fixed?

Obviously, not slotting it will require to wait until upstream or a 
developer patches the app to work with xulrunner-1.9.

----------------------

On the other hand, you won't be able to use firefox-3, seamonkey-2, 
thunderbird-3 to build an app against, since what the apps needs is 
xulrunner, not firefox or seamonkey.
So whatever is decided, please start fixing your ebuilds that use 
firefox, xulrunner, seamonkey or thunderbird, to stick the DEPEND to 
<www-client/mozilla-firefox-3,<www-client/seamonkey-2,<net-libs/xulrunner-1.9, 
<mail-client/mozilla-thunderbird-3 ASAP.

Thanks

[1] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/mozilla
[2] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-556225.html
[3] http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/misc/rindex/net-libs/xulrunner
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