Re: a bug in default .mozconfig

[Alexander Sack]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 01:12:28PM +0200, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 12:29:39PM +0200, Giuseppe Scrivano <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
> > Alexander Sack <address@hidden> writes:
> > 
> > > FWIW, Ubuntu has that (uploaded yesterday) ... I improved the plugin
> > > finger service in a way that allows users to have a choice and we host
> > > a plugin finder service that contains a database where all apt
> > > packages are registered .... see
> > > http://people.ubuntu.com/~asac/pfs/screens/pfs1.png
> > > ... http://people.ubuntu.com/~asac/pfs/screens/pfs2.png ...
> > What do you think about offer the possibility to show only
> > free-software plugins?  It can be done at server-side and we can share
> > this other service as well.
> 
> I'm not convinced it is a good idea to have filtering done at server-side.
> It would be IMHO much better if it was filtered at client side, it can then
> be possible to allow the user to show the non-free plugins if they want, or
> even, display them when there's nothing else (with a note indicating it's
> not free).

I agree that giving users a choice is better ... but I could live
with a gnuzilla extension that doesn't allow to see non-free plugins
... as its obviously not mandatory for the debian shipped packages to
have that extension installed - though we could still ship it and
share the same source-tree!!

> 
> Also, both sides should be backwards compatible if possible, so that
> current unpatched binaries can use our system and our patched binaries
> can use the mozilla datasource.
> 

FWIW, its not really patched, but all in an extension [1] ... and it can
still cope with upstream pfs data streams :).

The other direction will not work perfectly ... though it will work
somehow.

The reason why it *cannot* work is obvious: the old plugin-finder-wizard
is rather stupid and doesn't allow to present choices ... so you would
just see one random extension (most likely the first in the result)
per content-type instead of all suitable ones.

Anyway, I don't think that this is a problem given that upstream
recognizes this lack of choice as a large deficiency of their plugin
wizard and given that I plan to bring this plugin finder wizard to
upstream asap ... and as outlined above ... it doesn't break if you
point it on the official server.

... the goal to get this new plugin finder wizard upstream also
makes me think about which hooks would be beneficial for extensions
(like gnuzilla) to modify the behaviour without replacing the complete
wizard ...

For now I have on my list:

  * pluggable install methods (currently apt is hardcoded, but I plan
  to make this pluggable so you can add more install methods)

after this discussion i think it might be beneficial to get:

  * pluggable filters so extensions can filter results they want to
  hide.

as well.

If you have other things that you might want to tweak let me know.

 [1] - https://code.launchpad.net/~asac/ubufox/main

 - Alexander