On 04.06, Andi Payn wrote:
> On Saturday 05 April 2003 15:29, J.A. Magallon wrote:
> > it looks like Mozilla application is dead. Now we will have a
> > Mozilla-suite, split in several apps:
> 
> No no no, the whole point is to get _away from_ the "Mozilla-suite" idea, not 
> to move toward it! There will still be something that you can download as an 
> application suite if you want, but it'll be a collection of separate, 
> decoupled applications and extensions that can just as easily be used 
> independently. 
> 

Yup, perhaps the term 'suit' was not so well chosen, but that is what I
also understood, several separate apps.

> > - Mozilla browser is dead. They will switch to Phoenix (or whatever is it
> >   named after the copyrights war the seem to be inside...)
> 
> The existing default Mozilla browser (Seamonkey, aka /usr/bin/mozilla) is not 
> dead. At the end of November, when the stable 1.6 release is due, it will be 
> dead; until then, it's not. Phoenix, meanwhile, is still not done.
> 

Quoting the above reference:

1. Switch Mozilla's default browser component from the XPFE-based Navigator to the 
standalone Phoenix browser.

3. ... The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Phoenix and Thunderbird
   ...

So, as I understant it, 1.4 will be the last monolithic release, and then
the 1.5 branch will begin the big rework. Distributors can choose to maintain
1.4 themselves.

> You can, of course, just download Phoenix right now and use it 
> alongside/instead of Mozilla. But you're probably better off using Galeon or 
> Konqueror.
> 

Not sure if you take speed into account. Right now, with ties me to Galeon
is just the GTK look.

> > - Mozilla mailer is dead. Use Minotaur. A beta build is available.
> 
> Minotaur is not ready yet. Use Mozilla mailer. A beta Minotaur build is 
> nowhere near ready. 
> 
> An experimental build of Minotaur is available. To quote the download page, 
> "Please not that Minotaur is currently not even alpha quality software." 
> Meanwhile, the existing mailer is getting upgrades for 1.4, and possibly for 
> 1.5. You may want to play with Minotaur (to help development, or just to get 
> an idea of what changes are in store for the future), but you definitely 
> don't want to use it as your mail agent.
> 

Yup. I only tried to tell that it would be interesting to try to integrate
all this packages (ala hack-xxxx), to face the problems...

> You're probably better off with Kmail or Evolution or any of the thousand 
> other mail agents out there.
> 
> > - All they will build against GRE.
> 
> Mozilla, Phoenix, Minotaur, and many other apps already build against Gecko.
> 

All of them build against _its own copy of gecko_, not against a shared
one and only installed in the system. That is the big deal.

> > - And java now is gcc-3 safe...
> 
> Which is relevant how?
> 

Everything can be built with gcc3. Now everything that needs java is built
with 2.96 (mozilla, galeon, etc... BTW, how does work the nautilus ->
galeon-plug-ing -> gecko chain ??)

> > Do you see feasible to (;)):
> > - include GRE in cooker
> 
> Meaning the Gecko engine? It's already in cooker--and 9.1 and 9.0--as part of 
> the mozilla package.
> 
> If you mean splitting mozilla into, e.g., mozilla, libgecko, and 
> libgecko-devel, that's not a bad idea, but it's a lot of work--work that will 
> have to be redone for 1.4 and 1.5 and possibly the minor upgrades along the 
> way before being thrown out for 1.6. It's probably not worth it.
> 

Just for 1.4. And sure 1.5 will be out before next mdk release (theoretically, 
13 Aug).

> > - build phoenix against it (gcc3)
> 
> What else could you build Phoenix against besides Gecko?
> 

Se above, against the _shared_ gecko.

> If you want a Phoenix package for Mandrake, there are a lot of issues to 
> consider. Phoenix hasn't been designed for system-wide installation; it works 
> much better if you just unpack the tarball into your home directory and run 
> it from there.
> 
> Since Phoenix relies so much on letting users updating its chrome directory 
> (to install extensions or themes, for example), a shared installation pretty 
> much means that only root can configure it. Hopefully some future version 
> will pop up a su wrapper to let anyone install a new extension, separate out 
> installing the extension from enabling it, etc.
> 
> Anyone who can't handle installing Phoenix without an RPM probably won't get 
> much use out of it yet.
> 

I use the nightly builds for Phoenix, and the install themes on ~/.phoenix.
System wide files are unterred in /usr/lib/phoneix, and I just added
a symlink to the binary from /usr/bin.

> > - build galeon against it (and so, nautilus...)
> 
> Again, what would Galeon be built against besides Gecko? Why do you think the 
> galeon package requires the mozilla package?
> 
> > - include some other projects as epiphany ;)
> 
> Epiphany is yet another Gtk-native browser wrapped around Gecko, like Galeon 
> and Skipstone, but with tighter GNOME integration (it's sort of the exact 
> opposite of the everything-is-cross-platform Phoenix). It's nowhere near 
> complete, and I suspect that anyone who can't install it from source won't 
> have much reason to play with it yet.
> 

It looks pretty usable, the only thing that prevents me of installing it
is that I would need to install gcc-2.96 also to build against mozilla-devel :/.

> > I know it is a very very big deal, but you could take it as your
> > 'web-browsing-in-mandrake roadmap'...
> 
> Considering that Mandrake's default desktop is KDE and their default browser 
> is Konqueror, I suspect that they won't go for any roadmap that focuses on 
> Galeon and Epiphany.... 
> 

Mandrake seems a bit inclined to KDE (:(), but they have always done a
marvelous work with Gnome. For example, they included metacity and sawfish
both when it was not clear which will be the default. Same can happen with
Galeon and Epiphany.

> Obviously, Mandrake will have to take the future of Mozilla into account, but 
> they can do that just by tracking future versions of Mozilla, Galeon, and 
> other projects, just as they've done all along.
> 

I just ask for people who knows the internals (eg, builders of Mozilla-Galeon)
to guess how hard does all this look.

A big step forward, as I just said, will be to build mozilla and galeon
with gcc3, and let cookers grab the new beta JRE. Building more things
with 2.96 is counter-productive.

-- 
J.A. Magallon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>      \                 Software is like sex:
werewolf.able.es                         \           It's better when it's free
Mandrake Linux release 9.2 (Bamboo) for i586
Linux 2.4.21-pre7-jam1 (gcc 3.2.2 (Mandrake Linux 9.2 3.2.2-5mdk))

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