On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 6:15 AM, Vincent Cheng <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 5:43 AM, Karl Goetz <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Sun, 3 Apr 2011 12:08:39 +0100 >> Philip Taylor <[email protected]> wrote: >> > now, since https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628723 gives a >> > relatively stable modern version - just need to do a bit of work to >> > port the game to the latest version of the API. I can probably get >> > that done for the next alpha release of the game. >> >> Vincent, how do you feel about ITPing that too? >> > Isn't spidermonkey already available in Debian? If possible, I would rather > avoid filing an ITP; rather, I'd prefer including libmozjs-dev as a build > dependency for 0 A.D (and work with the Debian Mozilla crew if any changes > have to be made to libmozjs in order for 0 A.D. to get along with it).
SpiderMonkey doesn't provide any guarantees of API compatibility. (If they can make Firefox improve by 5% on a benchmark by breaking the API then they'll do so. The API was designed ~15 years ago so it's not surprising they have to tweak it to remain competitive). It also doesn't provide any guarantees of functional compatibility - its JavaScript language feature support might grow or shrink between releases. 0 A.D. depends on some relatively advanced SpiderMonkey features, and functional differences may cause mysterious out-of-sync errors in multiplayer games if players have different versions, so compatibility is important here. The idea behind the SpiderMonkey 1.8.5 release is that *does* provide compatibility, but only within the 1.8.5 series. They've released js185-1.0.0.tar.gz and might do a js185-1.0.1.tar.gz with backported bug fixes or security patches etc. Then at some point in the future there will probably be a js190-1.0.0.tar.gz based on the latest upstream code which will be totally incompatible. js190 and js185 should be separate packages, installed side-by-side, so applications can use whichever stable series they were designed for, instead of forcing every application to upgrade simultaneously whenever there's a new major release. (They all ought to upgrade eventually, but it should be possible to do that gradually.) So libmozjs-dev won't work since it doesn't provide the necessary compatibility, but a libmozjs185-dev would probably be okay (once 0 A.D. gets ported to the latest API changes in it). > Actually, I have to repack the tarball anyways in order to have 0ad and > 0ad-data build from the same source package, although they're offered as 2 > separate source packages upstream. It should be possible to build the two packages completely independently (and the -data package is architecture-independent so it can be built less frequently). The tests in the -build release package optionally run some scripts that are in the -data package, but those script tests are only useful for development and not needed when packaging, so you can just ignore their harmless warning message, and otherwise there should be no build-time dependencies between them. -- Philip Taylor [email protected] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
