[Enigmail] building the IPC library with xulrunner-dev instead of a full build tree

[Alexander Sack]

Hi all,

(I got pointed to this thread through private mail; since i did the
enigmail package in debian,i think its worthwhile to provide my ideas
on this thing ... so here we go ..)

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 06:38:20PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> Hi Patrick--
> 
> Thanks for the quick feedback!
> 
> On 03/16/2009 05:02 AM, Patrick Brunschwig wrote:
> > I think it's not trivial at all. If I were you, I'd try to find out how
> > Enigmail is built on Debian (i.e. download the Enigmail source package
> > of Debian) and follow the way it's done there.
> 
> Yeah, i've looked at that.  It looks like they ship a snapshot of a
> pruned mozilla build tree along with all the ipc source, so that they
> can unpack into it and rebuild in there.  Seems like a kind of messy way
> to do things, and "courtesy copies" of external code are discouraged by
> debian policy anyway these days.

Yes, we ship the mozilla build system; also we do that in quite a
hacky way - mostly because i supported building against mozilla and
thunderbird from the same tree.

BTW, its not a problem to ship that copy in debian. It doesnt conflict
with policy either imo, because the copied code is really just used at
build time and so there are no duplicated security risks (which is the
main reason why policy discourages that).

Anyway, I agree that we should do something finally.

We (the ubuntu mozillateam) have an effort to ease the way xulapps are
built. While extensions or individual components are not exactly the
same, most issues should match and I always wanted to ensure that
components and extensions can also benefit from this.

The current approach is shipping the build system as part of the
xulrunner sdk. This hasn't landed upstream yet and there definitly is
work left before that can happen, but upstream has signalled that they
would like something like that in the xulrunner sdk, so it seems the
way to go.

If you want to join our efforts, feel free to lurk on
#ubuntu-mozillateam. Me (asac) and fta are the right contacts to get
things started.

The other point (not ipc) is that there are thunderbird/mailnews
specific headers required for enigmail. We should also work on either
getting that code moved to xulrunner sdk or poke thunderbird devs
about officially providing a thunderbird sdk.


 - Alexander