Building the XULRunner SDK

Part of the XULRunner planning is not only to release builds of the XULRunner runtime platform, but also to produce and release a set of developer tools, which for lack of a better name I have been calling the XULRunner SDK, or XDK for short.

Several characteristics distinguish the XULRunner SDK from the currently released Mozilla SDK packages:

I am now in the process of implementing the build system which will be used to produce the XDK. My basic strategy is to package the XDK by tarring up the dist/ directory from a XULRunner build, just as the XULRunner runtime itself is packaged from the dist/bin directory. In order for this strategy to be reasonable, several things need to happen:

I would like some feedback on this proposal, especially as it affects RPM packages and Linux distributions. My current idea for RPM structures would look like this:

Yes, I know that this structure is a bit nonstandand and it would be slightly more unix-like to ship the headers to /usr/include/xulrunner-1.9. But I think it’s important to keep the structure, so that the mozilla build system can be used –with-libxul-sdk=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9-dev and have everything “just work”.

Atom Feed for Comments 6 Responses to “Building the XULRunner SDK”

  1. christian biesinger Says:

    > –with-libxul-sdk=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9-dev and have everything “just work”.

    the include directory in /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9-dev could be a symlink to /usr/include/xulrunner-1.9

  2. Darin Fisher Says:

    This sounds like a great plan to me. What can I do to help?

  3. Andrew Schultz Says:

    Would this work with pkgconfig (xulrunner.pc, or xulruner-1.9.pc)? If so, xulrunner.pc could specify locations for headers, libs, etc. and everything would still “just work”.

  4. Vlad Vukicevic Says:

    You may want to come up with a name other than “XDK” — that’s the name of the XBox Developer’s Kit. The chance of confusion seems low, but… I don’t have any good names to suggest, though. (XULKit?)

  5. Jamie Bliss Says:

    Can you make sure to include the DOM Inspector and Venkman in the SDK?

    I’m really looking forward to seeing this, because building mozilla on my box takes a long time.

  6. Wolfgang’s blog » Blog Archive » The Mozilla Platform on SUSE Says:

    […] The naming change and some other changes within the package were made to make it possible to have different versions of XULRunner installed on one system. As you can see there is still only one version allowed from a major Gecko release. So the next packages which will appear on FACTORY are mozilla-xulrunner181 etc. and some time in the future (if versioning scheme doesn’t change) mozilla-xulrunner190. There are also changes to adopt the structure and naming scheme according to Ben’s (XULRunner project lead) proposal which is primarily meant for version 1.9 and I don’t want to change the filesystem locations for the 1.8.0.x versions to keep it as compatible as possible with our released package. The upcoming 1.8.1.x package will most probably still follow the same directory structure. (Please note that I still have to figure out some details to make minor version upgrades possible without breaking applications embedding libgtkembedmoz.so using rpath or environment tricks.) […]

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