[GnomeSword-developers] gecko issues

[Matthew T. <ran...@gm...>]

Hi All,

We've recently had complaints from users on different platforms
regarding gecko issues. One issue was a simple missing XPCOM_GLUE
define in gecko-utils.cpp. This led me to read this file more closely,
and I've determined the cause of many of the other problems. The other
problems are these:

1. When a user has Firefox 3.6 installed (uses xulrunner-1.9.3),
Xiphos upon opening does *not* show any modules, but opens a
*nautilus* window for every Bible opened. Yes, you read that
correctly.
2. When Xiphos is built with xulrunner-1.9.0.x, but is run on a system
that has 1.9.1 *and* 1.9.0.x installed, Xiphos will not "jump to
anchor", that is, it won't scroll to the correct position upon
changing verses.

The reason that having different versions causes problems, is that
xpcom automatically locates an appropriate version of xulrunner and
dynamically loads it at runtime. xulrunner is binary compatible in the
1.9.0.x series and 1.9.1.x series, but not with each other. The reason
xpcom is loading an inappropriate version of xulrunner is that we are
not specific enough in our definition of allowed version ranges.

In src/gecko/gecko-utils.cpp, we have the following lines:
	static const GREVersionRange greVersion = {
		"1.9a", PR_TRUE,
		"2", PR_TRUE
	};

This means that when determining which versions of xulrunner are
appropriate, we're allowing anything from 1.9a (maybe this is an early
alpha of 1.9?) to 2. I'm not sure which it tries first on any system,
but on my system, I have 1.9.0.14 and 1.9.1.3. I'm building against
1.9.1.3, but it's loading 1.9.0.14 at runtime (yes, this means I also
have the jump-to-anchor issue; just realized it). So, to solve this
issue on my system, I changed the code to

	static const GREVersionRange greVersion = {
		"1.9.1", PR_TRUE,
		"1.9.1.10", PR_TRUE
	};

This works fine, and solves the jump-to-anchor issue here. 1.9.1.10 is
a made-up number; I'm not sure how to specify "maximum number possible
in the 1.9.1.x series", which is what I want.

My conclusion is that we need to modify these ranges at build-time. If
building with 1.9.0.x, the upper limit should be 1.9.1. If building
with 1.9.1, the lower limit should be 1.9.1 and the upper limit should
be "maximum number possible in the 1.9.1.x series". So if anybody has
any suggestions to modify the build system to do this, that would be
great. I don't have a clue.

Matthew

PS or we could switch to webkit.....