Help! Summarizing the xulrunner situation in OLPC

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:

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

This is actually the simpler issue to fix, aiui -- just caillon asking 
some questions upstream to make sure it makes sense (i.e. not broken beta 
software they're afraid to ship.)

--g

> 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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>