Here at the Gnome at Sun team it has just become clear to us that
Nautilus
requires milestone 19 of Mozilla to work. We are currently trying to
figure out how we should support Nautilus with its unique requirements.
Obviously it would be idea if Nautilus could use the same version of
Mozilla that is used by Netscape. Mozilla has a fairly large footprint,
so it would be nice if users only had to install the version of Mozilla
that is shipped with Netscape and have Nautilus work. Also it will
complicate the building, testing, and shipping of Gnome if we have
to support our own separate version of Mozilla.
Here at Sun, Netscape 6 can be downloaded from the following web page:
http://www.sun.com/solaris/netscape/
The currently available release is really Netscape 6 release plus about
20-30 bug fixes. In other words, it is derived from the Netscape 6
source code tree from last year (Mozilla 0.6, the RTM branch dated
11/14/00), and is not M19.
So, it seems like we have a few options to support Nautilus' Mozilla
integration:
1. Is it possible to patch the Mozilla 0.6 (11/14/00) branch that is
currently used by Netscape so that it will work with Nautilus? If so
could anyone point out which specific code changes were required in
Milestone 19 to make Nautilus work? Can anyone give any idea of how
much work would be involved to tackle this sort of patch?
2. Is there any plan among the Netscape community to release a newer
version of Netscape with Mozilla milestone 19? If so, how long will
we have to wait for this? I ask this question because obviously this
problem will go away if the Netscape folks are going to upgrade to
milestone 19 sometime in the near future.
3. The only other alternative that comes to mind would be for us to
include
a second version of Mozilla along with Nautilus. It seems that this
would be undesirable for the reasons described above (large footprint
with multiple installs, extra work involved with building, testing,
and shipping, etc.)
4. Any other options I am not thinking of?
Is there any sort of roadmap for dealing with these sorts of problems?
I am thinking that we are likely not the first people with this sort of
issue, and would be interested in hearing how others are dealing with
this problem.
Thanks much!
Brian Cameron
Sun Gnome Team
