OLPC Policies Question Concerning Upgrading Default Installed Software

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 10:54 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 5:21 PM,  <anthony at evolutionindesignz.com> wrote:
>> In particular, we are having issues with XULRunner 1.9.1.9. We are
>> considering unstalling this version and replacing it with XULRunner 8.0.

Well depending on what your aiming for I would look at the XO-OS 12
release cycle, the test builds currently have xulrunner 9 and will
follow that closely, and on top of that Browse for that release will
have moved to webkit so you won't destroy massive chunks of the
desktop interface in the process.

> It'll probably break both Firefox and Sugar's Browse -- they are
> tightly bound to the xulrunner version.

No probably about it, it most definitely will. It will also likely
break other chunks of the f-14 desktop inc gnome.

> So nobody is stopping you, but you need to know quite a bit to rebuild
> or upgrade all the dependent bits, and deal with the (likely
> important) API changes.

Which will likely require rebuilding and pulling patches from
upstream, not a small change.

> The xulrunner API changes were so painful (according to people working
> on Browse) that for future Sugar versions we are moving to webkit; we
> are also dropping firefox on the Gnome side and switching to something
> based on webkit.
>
> You are free to take it, bit seems like a damn rocky road.

There was a rpm for firefox 4/5 possibly 6 that allowed xulrunner to
be installed into a separate namespace on f-14. It would likely be
better to look at that so its parallel installable. I don't remember
where they were though.

Peter