Help! Summarizing the xulrunner situation in OLPC

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

We will also need to enable pyxpcom in the fedora firefox for Browse to work.

Marco

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Greg Dekoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> So today I had a meeting with Christopher Aillon, the maintainer of all
> things Mozilla in Fedora, and it helped greatly to shape my understanding
> of the issues around xulrunner for OLPC and/or Sugar and/or Fedora.
>
> My proposed goal is to maintain a xulrunner package in Fedora that meets
> the needs of OLPC.  Why?  So that (a) the Browse activity (which imho is
> the most important activity in Sugar with the possible exception of
> Journal) can run natively in Fedora without forcing naive users to figure
> out how to resolve package conflicts; and (b) OLPC is not forced to carry
> a forked xulrunner, and the maintenance headaches that go along with it.
>
> So here's the current situation, as I understand it; caillon and others,
> please correct me if I go astray:
>
> 1. xulrunner, with all dependencies, takes up "a lot" of space on the
> target system, for some definition of "a lot".  Printing support, for
> instance, brings a whole chain of dependencies along with it.
>
> 2. In an effort to cut down on space, OLPC has built its own xulrunner
> that breaks these dependencies.
>
> 3. These dependencies will be coming back someday in the upstream, when
> Mozilla makes these hard dependencies instead of soft dependencies.
>
> If this analysis is correct, it forces us to answer some key questions.
>
> 1. Space.  What are the real space requirements for the xulrunner
> dependencies?  Do we have any hard numbers that we can analyze?  Is it
> reasonable to carry all of the dependencies along in OLPC?  How were the
> decisions made to leave out certain pieces of the xulrunner dependency
> chain, and can those decisions be revisited?
>
> 2. Future.  My understanding of how the dependencies will move in the
> future from "soft" to "hard" is incomplete.  When these changes happen,
> what will be the exact impact on people who are trying to maintain a
> slimmed-down xulrunner that breaks these dependencies?
>
> --g
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