Re: Status of Epiphany extention

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 17:05 -0400, digger vermont wrote:
> 	What is the status of the Epiphany extension? Ubuntu dapper doesn't
> ship it.  The README in Beagle's source doesn't instill much in the way
> of confidence. It almost seems to recommend not using it.  Yet the
> announcements for new versions on Beagle always mention the Epiphany
> extension along with Firefox.

The extension is essentially unmaintained.  Occasionally someone will
file a bug against it with a patch, but it hasn't gotten much love in a
while.

The README is a little out of date; the program it runs is called
beagle-index-url and while there is the possibility of the rogue
program, it's no different than almost any application on your system
which executes programs.  The security concern listed in the README is
very overstated.

That said, the Epiphany extension doesn't use the new method of saving
web page content into the well-known ~/.beagle/ToIndex directory like
the Firefox one does.  This is the preferred way, as there's much less
overhead in just dropping in a couple files than executing a process
once per page view.  I'd happily take a patch to change that.

The extension is mentioned along with the Firefox one because it's there
and it works (I think), even if it doesn't get much love.  If it doesn't
actually work and no one is going to maintain it, I'll remove it from
the release announcement.

> I was going to enter a bug-report with Ubuntu to get the extension
> compiled.  But I wonder if its condition is such at the moment that it
> should be left alone?

I don't see any harm in this.  I'm not an Epiphany user, so without
feedback from the people who use it, I really have no idea if it works
or not.

Joe