Most of the work (all?) on FireWatir has been done by Angrez Singh and his partner Abishek. Angrez has been busy lately and has not had the time to reply to all the requests and suggestions and patches. But he remains committed to FireWatir.
Personally, i very much support the idea of getting Watir to work on Mac and Linux, but i will not be coordinating this effort. My current job has me solidly in the Windows world, and i've probably made less of use of Cygwin/Linux/Unix in the past six months that at any previous time in my career. (Some time ago i made a few changes to Watir to ensure that it could run in Cygwin, which was important to me at the time.) In any case, I've reviewed the FireWatir code and it is not clear to me that there is much overlap between the code needed to support FireFox and the code needed by Watir/IE. Therefore, i am suggesting that it be run as a separate project. The code base is currently hosted as a branch of the Watir code base, but i frankly don't see it being merged back in to trunk. I suggest that it be more formally moved into a separate repository: it could be a firewatir module in the existing Watir SVN repo at OpenQA. Or a separate project entirely on OpenQA or RubyForge. I'm happy to support it in any of these forms.
The only real significant overlap that i see is with the Windows Dialog Box support, which is only useful for FireFox on Windows. It is also my view that this code in Watir is embarrassing unreliable and hard to use. I have some ideas on how to improve it, and have committed some partial improvements to it to SVN, but I haven't really been motivated to follow through on this. It bothers me that so many people struggle with winclicker and all, but personally, i find that i can usually just avoid the dialogs entirely. I realize that this isn't always possible -- but it hasn't been something that has gotten in my way. Not yet any how. The approach i've mainly been taking is "steal from WET". They've mostly figured out how to make this stuff work reliably.
I think what i'd really like to see is someone take the WET dialog support that Raghu and Satya have developed and then package it as a separate gem that could be used by Watir and FireWatir/Windows and WET. I seem to recall Kingsley sending me a private note that he was working on this, but haven't seen much announced.
Anyway, that is what i suggest. I also would like to mention some of Watir's history. Watir grew out of the Web Testing with Ruby project and was made of experiments with how to use Ruby for web testing. Chris Morris published the first IE/COM driver in Ruby. I started making modifications to this, Paul Rogers got ideas for making his own, and then Paul and I decided to work to gether to make a new one from scratch, based on TDD, so that it would have unit tests for all its features. That is what turned into Watir.
Watir is becoming more mature, which makes its development more conservative. Many of the people who's suggestions and contributions have been rejected have come to understand what it means when we have a large established base of users who don't think kindly to API changes unless they are strictly necessary. Even pulling out something peripheral like assert_arrayEquals has caused some alarm.
But what FireWatir needs is more experimentation, and that means that it needs to be developed according to different development rules from Watir. I am happy to consult, and to hear any ideas about how it might develop differently, but i think it is time for it to spread its wings, and am not so sure that it wouldn't even be best if there were a couple active versions of Ruby/FireFox drivers, free to share code and ideas between them, but with out too much worry about consistency and agreement.
Bret
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