Re: New Module Proposal. libseed

[Robert Carr <carrr rpi edu>]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 6:18 PM, Havoc Pennington
<havoc pennington gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
>>  - Alignment with HTML components in GNOME. The apparent trend towards
>>   WebKit in Epiphany, Yelp, etc certainly gives a strong impetus to
>>   going towards JavascriptCore and avoiding a Gecko dependency.
>
> It's worth noting that the gecko dependency is purely a
> how-the-tarballs-are-done dependency, not a code dependency. That is,
> spidermonkey does not actually link to anything else in gecko, it is a
> standalone 600k library. Its namespace is JS_, not anything about NS
> or Moz.
>
> Debian appears to package it separately as "libmozjs" even. But it's a
> big mess because then xulrunner doesn't actually use that copy or
> something. In essence it's a mess upstream as far as packaging,
> there's no standard upstream install location, .pc file, etc.
>
> But, code-wise, spidermonkey is just a smallish standalone library, is
> the point.
>
> I don't even think there's much downside to using spidermonkey in the
> same process as webkit, since spidermonkey is small. It's just the
> same scenario as using webkit inside a python app or a C++ app. It
> doesn't matter that the python or C++ isn't used inside the html
> widget, either.
>
> Where you do get some "synergy" is that xulrunner (not inside the web
> widget, but outside) can plausibly use modules from gjs. But this
> would be irrelevant for something like the old Gecko-based epiphany,
> because JS there is used only inside the web widget, so gjs modules
> would never be usable. So it sort of only matters for xulrunner apps.
>
> Havoc
This is actually a pretty similar situation to WebKit, JavaScriptCore
is actually packaged as a separate library on OSX/windows, and I'd
like to see that happen for the GTK ports build system also. I do
however think it would be nice long term to not be mixing WebKit and
Mozilla everywhere, however it's certainly possible.