Re: Proposed: mozilla-bonobo

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco gnome org>]

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 11:51, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Marco Pesenti Gritti">
> 
> > > I really haven't heard anything about this, though some chatter with Chris
> > > Blizzard indicated that there is (or would be) a better way of doing this
> > > based on existing Mozilla technology.
> > 
> > I'd be interested to know more details about this. Last blizzard public
> > mail seemed to be positive about it:
> > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-October/msg00521.html
> 
> Hmm, yeah, weird. Update, Chris? What do you think about it, Marco?

Assuming it's done in the right way (waiting Chris opinion on this) I
think we should definately work towards integration of mozilla-bonobo in
GNOME. Mainteinance costs are low (small code base), it reuse our core
technologies (well Gecko isnt stricly yet but I hope it will be) and
most importantly it provides important functionalities.  The current
situation with plugins is sad and we need to solve it without depending
on proprietary technologies and integrating the better is possible with
the other parts of the desktop: being able to view inline video, svg and
similars in a gnome viewer would be already a good step.
Even leaving aside the controversial embedded views for pdf, gnumeric
documents etc, it could be useful for example to provide more powerful
image viewing functionalities.

Though I dont think we are still mature enough to include it in 2.6.
Issues:

1 Testing

I dont think we have enough user testing on it. It's not in jhbuild,
it's not in garnome, it's not in bugzilla (and it requires to manually
pass a parameter to configure). Especially in applications that connect
so many modules together I think it's crucial to have good testing to be
able to judge quality.

2 Security

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2003-December/msg00009.html

Not sure how much real are the concerns, we certainly need to look
carefully into it.

3 Integration

Random thoughts:

- Should we have embedded views of documents like pdf, gnumeric ... ?
- Should the use plugin/download behavior be configurable ? (there is a
gconf key in mozilla-bonobo but if configurability is needed we must
find a good way to expose it in the ui)
- About inline content, do we have good enough video/svg etc components
?

They are not clear cut issues and I'm sure more would raise when we
would actually start to use it. So I think we need some time to think to
these carefully and test them. Obviously feel free to blame me to suck
badly and not have started to work on these before ...

Note that these are just opinions. If the release team think we have
enough time to reach maturity in time for the freeze, I'll do my best
for that to happen.

Marco