[sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 12:11 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>> Yes, I agree that this is a goal that makes a lot of sense.
>> Unfortunately, my experience says that the approach you are suggesting
>> won't be less work than what we are doing right now, because the
>> software components you mentioned aren't so easily malleable as you
>> seem to think.
>
> Your argument might be correct for Abiword (I haven't look at the
> code) but are completely off-base for Firefox, which is based on a
> very sophisticated XUL/Javascript/XML based extensibility framework,
> with far better developer support than we currently have for Python.

Well, with our current model, you can develop extensions in C++, JS
and python in the same way you would do it for firefox or any other
xulrunner-based app. And you can use those extensions as well in any
of those apps if it makes any sense. So I think in this regard we are
doing things as you are asking.

About using XUL instead of the usual pygtk-based activity stuff, I
really cannot see how it would help us. I don't see any advantage but
see lots of code that would need to be rewritten. Can you enumerate
the advantages you see by moving to use the XUL stuff? I guess you are
suggesting to do something similar to Songbird.

Thanks,

Tomeu