[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] mozilla-devscripts has CDBS for mozilla extensions

[Alexander Sack]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 05:10:52PM +0200, Guido Günther wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 03:08:52PM +0200, Sveinung Kvilhaugsvik wrote:
> > Hello!
> > 
> > I see on the web page of this team
> > (http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianMozExtTeam) that you have writing
> > a cdbs class to ease packaging on your to do list. Are you aware of
> > mozilla-devscripts that recently entered Debian? (See
> > http://packages.qa.debian.org/m/mozilla-devscripts.html) It contains a
> > cdbs class for extensions. Have you had a look at it to see if it fits
> > your needs?
> Are you talking about xpi.mk? AFAIK this repacks xpi's and doesn't build
> them from source. The idea was to ease building from source.
> Cheers,

Thats a misunderstanding :) ...

Yes, we also have tools shipped that make it trivial to package
extensions from .xpis (which makes sense for all non-binary
extensions), but that doesnt mean xpi.mk is ment to be useful only for
that.

Point is that xpi.mk is just using .xpi as the _intermediate_
format. it doesn't matter how you get to that stage; it should work
for all extensions as all build systems usually provide a way to
produce a .xpi for the extension.

Once you have a .xpi xpi.mk will take over and apply the magic and
best practices (and policy) for you: like installing the extension to
the right place and adding links to the appropriate mozilla extension
folders, adding the right depends to your control and probably more.

In 0.14 we got (among others) the following cool new features:

1. auto guess the right locations to link the extension to based on
targetApplications in install.rdf (it even considers the version as
good as possible); so you dont need to maintain that manually and it
uses the new locations we previously discussed
(e.g. /usr/lib/mozilla/$appid/extensions/$extid -> /real/install/of/extension)

2. auto add the right depends through ${xpi:Depends} ... 

So please check it out. In the mid term, I would really like to see
the extension policy being codyfied in xpi.mk and vice-versa.

Comments?

 - Alexander