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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