Packaging xulrunner extensions: dependencies

[Ville-Pekka Vainio]

Hi,

As we just saw with nspluginwrapper, packaging things dependening on 
xulrunner/Firefox is a bit problematic. My Mozvoikko package was recently 
approved by Ville Skyttä (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=448215) 
but he had a good question about the dependencies:

"If I understand correctly, using xulrunner-unstable makes this prone to 
breakage on updates - is there some versioned dependency towards some package 
that could be used so that it would be easier to notice such cases?"

I think the answer here is no. Or is there? We just saw what happens if you 
hardcode a xulrunner version as a dependency, there will be breakage as soon 
as xulrunner is updated. I had the Mozvoikko package from that review 
installed as well and it worked fine after the update of Firefox and 
xulrunner. So I think I should just leave the xulrunner dependency 
unversioned and rebuild the mozvoikko package if I notice the extension being 
broken after a xulrunner update.

I also noticed something interesting about xulrunner-devel and 
xulrunner-devel-unstable. Mozvoikko can't be built just with the stable 
headers which apparently are in /usr/include/xulrunner-sdk-1.9/stable/. For 
example it needs mozISpellCheckingEngine.h. This file can be found from two 
locations, however. The xulrunner-devel package puts it 
in /usr/include/xulrunner-sdk-1.9/spellchecker/mozISpellCheckingEngine.h and 
the xulrunner-devel-unstable package puts it 
in /usr/include/xulrunner-sdk-1.9/unstable/mozISpellCheckingEngine.h. Why are 
there two copies and is it considered stable or unstable? I'm thinking 
it's "classified" as unstable, but why is it in the "stable devel package" 
then as well?

Anyway, unless someone gives me a big no about this soon, I'll request CVS and 
start putting mozvoikko into Rawhide and F-9. If there's breakage at some 
point, I'll deal with it the best I can.


-- 
Ville-Pekka Vainio