Re: gnuzilla, iceweasel, thundersomewhat

[Alexander Sack]

On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 03:13:10PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Alexander, and Giuseppe,
> 
>     If you want we can start a discussion on our mailing list, 
> 
> Yes, let's :).  Alexander, thank you very much for writing.  I took the
> liberty of subscribing you to this list.
> 
> Adding thunderbird (lightningfish? :) to the gnuzilla project sounds
> great to me.  I'm not sure the best way to organize it -- just a second
> top-level directory in CVS?  (Obviously no problem to add you to the
> savannah project.)  Is there significant shared code between firefox and
> thunderbird?

How about snoweagle :) ... as lightning is already a project used
for integrated calendar service in thunderbird and is likely to be
trademarked (already or in future).

thunderbird, firefox and seamonkey share almost all code ... only the
mozilla/browser/ directory and the mozilla/mail directory are disjunct
as far as I know.

In fact mozilla organizes all those applications in a single CVS
tree (including seamonkey). So maybe we should follow them and
just mirror their CVS, excluding those files that we do not want. This
would allow us to keep track of development and maybe even produce
preview releases for trunk or "next major branches" at some point.

> 
> In addition to the trademarks, another thing that concerns us is the
> large number of binary files in the firefox distribution.  For example,
> there are a bunch of Windows executables.  We must remove all such
> things before making a GNU release.  (I have a long list of files that
> must be looked at.)  Have you looked at doing anything along those
> lines?  Would you have any time to help in that respect?
> 

There are a bunch of files that can be removed beneath
mozilla/other-licenses. In addition the windows executables should
only live inside the mozilla/build/ directory, iirc. I agree that we
should strip them down before we release.

Please post the list of files you already figured out, and I can take a
look if I know of more.

> BTW, I should mention that Giuseppe has done all the real work (and
> there's been a lot of it, given how often mozilla internals seem to be
> rearranged).  My input is basically just a little testing, tweaking the
> web page, organization, etc.
> 
> Thanks again.  It wuold be great to move forward with this.
> 

Giuseppe, how do you do the synching? Do you have scripts for that? Do
you mirror CVS? How do you keep fork-changes?

IMO, it might be a good idea to sync the CVS repository and somehow
(how?) maintain patches we have in order to make this really-free.

How did you change the behaviour for not defaulting to proprietary
plugins? Can you show me the current patchset for that?

 - Alexander

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