[Sugar-devel] Browse and the move to WebKit

[Todd Whiteman]

Note: Resent (as I needed to subscribe to sugar-devel).

On 12-02-21 02:32 PM, lkcl luke wrote:
>> pyxpcom is still actively maintained by toddw (activestate). I'm not clear
>> on what sugar/olpc actually desire here: the pyxpcom code works about as
>> well as it ever did.
>
>   there are only two versions still running that people can actively
> use, that have been confirmed as working:
>
>   * python-xpcom with xulrunner 1.9.1 (and 1.9.2) - the changes made
> which broke things were the xpcom interface changes.  i'm extremely
> grateful to todd for getting xpcom up-and-running again but it's taken
> this long for it to happen!
>   * python-xpcom with xulrunner 9.0.  this i tested with
> pyjamas-desktop last week: it works as perfectly as it ever did (with
> only one outstanding bug for code that's not really properly paid
> attention to, out of thousands of functions and properties that's not
> bad! the function i'm referring to is Canvas2D DrawImage.  it just...
> doesn't work, period.)

PyXPCOM supports all XulRunner versions from 1.9.1 through to XulRunner 
9.0 - versions are tagged in hg here:
     http://hg.mozilla.org/pyxpcom/tags

Komodo is the prime example of an application using PyXPCOM 
successfully, using versions 1.9.1, 2.0.0 and currently using 7.0.0 in 
Komodo 7.

For Canvas DrawImage problem - it looks like PyXPCOM does not support 
the "optional_argc" IDL/xpcom setting. This should get a bug report it, 
as I'd imagine it's fixable in pyxpcom.

> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Brendan Eich<brendan at mozilla.com>  wrote:
>   so, to summarise:
>
>   * python-xpcom not being part of mozilla-central is causing
> python-xpcom to be "out of sync" (for example that massive PRBool ->
> bool update)

The Mozilla applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) do not use the 
Pyxpcom code - so I don't think they should have to maintain it. The 
Mozilla code is changing fast nowadays, and it shouldn't have to wait on 
smaller projects like Pyxpcom to become compatible.

Pyxpcom has not been updated for Mozilla central (XulRunner 11+) yet. 
Komodo (ActiveState) has plans for continued Pyxpcom use, so I'm sure 
that it will get updated some time in the future. If anyone else has 
need of it sooner - they too can fix the Pyxpcom code and contribute the 
changes back... this is how Open Source projects work.

>
>   * python-xpcom is middleware so *cannot* have comprehensive tests

Note that Pyxpcom does have it's own set of tests to test the Python 
XPCOM functionality:
     http://hg.mozilla.org/pyxpcom/file/3856dbd68d5d/xpcom/test
so being middleware is not a testing problem.

Cheers,
Todd