On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 11:07:05PM +0000, Gervase Markham wrote:
>
> Heck, why not have separate domain names for all mozilla.org's
> componentised technologies? Then, they would all be magically finished and
> usable! ;-)
>
> <goes off to register www.xpconnect.net>
>
Not to be negative towards the XPConnect owners ... but ...
It's not a matter of "magically they'll be finished if they become
independent projects". It's a matter of "maybe if they become independent
projects, the people who have been offering to fix all the dumb crap that's
broken now will be allowed to do so".
I have been requesting the right to implement and submit for approval (and
get guidance on along the way, since it's a lot of code i'm not that
familiar with) a couple of XPConnect features, most importantly support for
typelibs in multiple locations.
This is functionality for *mozilla* as a *component* -- part of mozilla's
core goal, and should easily fall under the "get a browser done quickly
rather than be all things to all people" part of mozilla's devel philosophy
(which i totally understand). IMHO it's a serious problem if things like
plugins and embedders can't add their own type info, and are therefore
forced to use their own private installations of mozilla (we're talking
about unix here; no braindamaged default install permissions to let any
user's programs write to the system components/ dir). For that matter,
component registration is broken too, but at least plugins and embedders can
register components at startup.
I've offered to write this about half a dozen times in various places.
I've stated clearly that I *do* have the time to do this.
I've stated clearly that IBM will *pay* me to do this -- it's necessary for
SashXB.
I'm *still* not seeing and attitude on the part of mozilla developers that
says "we need to help outside developers contribute to mozilla".
Although I *am* seeing complaints on the part of mozilla developers that
they feel like no outside-the-project people have joined the fold, and that
they're carrying all the weight themselves.
This little discrepancy is starting to annoy me.
(for the record, for the time being SashXB is going to follow the disgusting
hackish behaviour of installing its own private copy of mozilla. this is
*not* a good thing for SashXB, which is supposed to be *very* small -- it
would otherwise be < 1 mb. this is part of a large pattern of *braindamaged*
behaviour on mozilla's part wrt the difference between system- and
user-level information. this is imho because the mozilla developers honestly
didn't get this right the first time -- and they didn't get it right the
first time because they developed on windows, which is always a bad idea, in
this case do to continually broken access and installation idioms on
windows).
/me is *pissed*.
ari
