I feel that guranteeing a future to the flow has to go through syncing our patched Rhino version with the official one. If we are unable to lobby them and let it go through their main CVS (which would be of course the best solution), at a very least we should maintain a set of patches and keep them in sync with their latest code (I'm afraid that Gump can't do that unfortunately...).
This is for a number of reasons: not only we might want bugfixes (think about security holes...), but we might also want enhancement (the next big thing in ECMAScript might be native XML support, with XPath and the like, go figure...).
Today I wanted to have a look on how much work has to be done to sync the current version with the rhino current CVS. Under the assumption that it was enough to have org.mozilla.javascript.continuations compile with the latest rhino, I played with cocoondev and mozilla's CVS. So far I'm having mixed results: I was able to drop the errors from 651 to 76, which in itself might look good, but this was only possible by paying a quite high price. The Mozilla core stuff is not designed for extendability: almost everything is final and private. I was wondering if Christopher had to hack his way through as I did today, by changing visibility all the way across the Mozilla code.
This is a huge problem in itself, but I won't despair... at a very least we might be able to keep all the stuff as a set of patches. Now, two questions:
1. do you think that changing the core Mozilla code is something we should really do (and, Christopher, has it been done in the past)? It's not about logic, just about making privates protected or public, yet I don't quite feel it's the way to go. Suggestions?
2. I'm wondering if there is someone interested in joining this effort: I'm not a rhino or flow guru, and I'm having quite an hard time figuring out what to do next. If so, how can we manage to join forces?
LMK,
-- Gianugo Rabellino Pro-netics s.r.l. - http://www.pro-netics.com Orixo, the XML business alliance - http://www.orixo.com (Now blogging at: http://blogs.cocoondev.org/gianugo/)
