Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT sourcemage.org>]

Hi!

I've just finished reading the new Roadmap proposal. I had three concerns
regarding Mozilla: 1) over-integrated application suite, 2) Gecko not visible
enough, 3) non-existent advocacy of things other than Gecko as a platform, not
to mentioning their in-existent "platform-able" packaging. They've all been
addressed in the consistent way in the Roadmap, I can't be more happy of the
chosen direction. Thanks a lot for this!
However, I do have one issue which is important for me as a packager of 
Mozilla
in our source-based distribution. Generally, Mozilla developers are reluctant 
to
put up for distribution a packaged source code which corresponds to released
binaries, which makes it rather inconvenient for people like me to provide
adequate support for it. I'd be happy to see Gecko, XUL, and other extremely
important "platform" components, not only developed in a more self-contained
way, but also distributed as such. Instead of one huge Mozilla package, I'd be
able to provide "mix and match" capability to users and developers utilizing 
our
dustribution (proper dependency control is our responsibility here and we
acomplish it). I'd also be able to justify a development of some client-side
applications to be based on Gecko etc., for business uses by my company, with
all of the improvements we'd be able to achieve going back into the tree. All 
of
this is possible if I could point at a web site/team/tarball combination and 
say
"this is Gecko (XUL, XPCOM, ...), it does this, it's licensed like this,
distributed like this, source tarball here, built like this, and documentation
is here".
In one sentence, my point is that self-contained (modularized, partitioned,
whatever) development is good, but delivery/distribution in a finished
self-contained form is much better, provides better recognition and perception
of component as a separate entity.
Thanks for your attention! Good luck!


-- 
Sergey A. Lipnevich,
Section guru for: collab, http,
Source Mage GNU/Linux,
http://www.sourcemage.org/.