Background/clarification Re: Annouce: Latest Accessibility Build of Sun Mozilla 1.7 for JDS

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Greetings,

There has been a lot of discussion (and criticism) around Sun Beijing's 
announcement of the availability of a build of accessible Mozilla on 
ftp.mozilla.org.  I'd like to try to address (at least some of) those 
concerns/criticisms.

Sun is working on a branch of Mozilla based on 1.7 which will go into the next 
OS releases from Sun.  This release needs to meet accessibility requirements, 
and is also under tight deadline constraints.  Because of this, we are doing 
all of our work first in our branch, and then as a background process working 
to get those changes into Mozilla head.

I requested that the Sun Beijing team post to ftp.mozilla.org their 
semi-weekly builds so that a wider audience outside of Sun can get a sense of 
Mozilla accessibility progress (see the list of 104 accessibility bugs fixed: 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/accessibility/suse/2004-10-15-sun-mozilla-1.7/README.html). 
 It would of course be ideal if all of these bug fixes were already in 
Mozilla head; unfortunately both because of the code review process and the 
many other tasks on Sun Beijing's plate mean most of these bug fixes haven't 
yet made it in there.

As I think has been clarified by Loiue and Kyle, we made two Linux binaries 
available.  The "SuSE" build is for the Sun Java Desktop System (based on 
SuSE) as well as other SuSE-based desktops.  In addition, because much of the 
community uses RedHat-based builds (including Fedora) - and especially much of 
the disability community because Fedora Core 2 includes accessibility support 
and is generally available - Sun Beijing as a courtesy also posted a "RedHat" 
build.  We intentionally went with an older RedHat with the expectation that 
it would be forward compatible.  Given the feedback from this list, we will 
move to using Fedora going forward as the basis for this build.  We'll also 
make source tarballs available.


A lot of people have been waiting for quite a while for accessible UNIX 
mozilla.  The intent of these builds is to enable that community to benefit 
from our work without having to wait for all of the bugfixes to get into 
Mozilla head, and to be in a position to give feedback on the bug fixes.  I 
encourage all of you to peruse the list of 104 bugs fixed - just don't try to 
follow the links to the bug numbers, which [oops] are to Sun's internal bug 
database that isn't visible outside.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team


louie zhao wrote:
> Hi, all
>
> The latest build of Sun Mozilla 1.7 for JDS has been uploaded to
> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/accessibility/suse/2004-10-15-sun-mozilla-1.7/
>
> "Sun Mozilla 1.7 for JDS" is based on Mozilla 1.7 of Community and will 
> be integrated in Sun Java Desktop System. Accessibility feature of "Sun 
> Mozilla 1.7 for JDS" is based on ATK and is running on Linux/Unix 
> system.  "Sun Mozilla 1.7 for JDS" has integrated a lot of Accessibility 
> bug-fixing, most of which haven't been checked in trunk code of mozilla 
> community at present. This build is for users who is interested in 
> trying or testing Accessibility feature on GNOME 2 in advance. This 
> version is built on SuSE Linux.
>
> In addition, there is a build based on RedHat
> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/accessibility/redhat8.0/2004-10-15-sun-mozilla-1.7/
>
> README file for detail build information and bug fixing list is also 
> available under above link.
>
> Thanks for reading.
> --
>
> Louie Zhao
> Software Engineer, Browser Team
> Sun Microsystems, Inc.
> Ext: x82817
> Phone:  +86-10-8261-8200
> Fax:    +86-10-6278-0969
> email:  louie zhao sun com <mailto:louie zhao sun com>