Gecko installer

[Jacek Caban]

Hi Boaz,

Boaz Harrosh wrote:
> Hi Jacek.
>
> This would maybe also Address my problem. Please see my posting this 
> week [Wine's Mozilla Control - Very old]
I doubt if it's what you need. This implementation replaces windows' 
DLLs. What you need is something that replaces only the control. 
Choosing our implementation you loose advantages of Gecko but you get 
more compatibility with IE.
> Please I have a few Questions:
> - Are you intending to produce a PE Gecko installer maintained by you 
> or are you using a ready made package?
I have a cab file that contains all the needed libraries. This is 
SeaMonkey with some files removed or changed to reduce its size. It 
would be better to build the package ourselves in the future, but it's 
not so important ATM. The code that installs Gecko will be in our MSHTML 
so that no more installers will be needed.
> - Will this package be updated from time to time when Gecko is 
> updated? and kept as current as possible?
Yes, that's the plan.
> - In theory, do you think your implementation when finished could be 
> replacing the "Mozilla ActiveX control" on windows (and ReactOS).
The plan is to replace IE libraries, not Mozilla ActiveX control. This 
means replacing the use of Mozilla ActiveX control in Wine (and ReactOS) 
but it's not an option for apps that want to embed Gecko. BTW if someone 
wants to embed Gecko, raw Gecko API is a better choice (and perhaps GTK 
wrapper for Linux) IMO.
> I don't think you will have any problems with DLL names since Windows 
> can be made to load local DLL's first.
That's not the goal of this work but if someone really wants it, one can 
do it.
> Any way a Makefile hack could be made to change the names.
Our goal to replace these DLLs...
> You will, however, need an alternative GUID for windows if needed to 
> run alongside IE.
Again, that's our goal to replace these objects, not to give an app an 
alternative implementation.
> - Will/are you in contact with Mozilla.org people to support us in 
> this task. (Updates, chromes, settings, plugins ...)
We'll provide our own package so we'll have to do updates ourselves. 
There are some changes I'd like to do in Gecko to allow better MSHTML 
implementation and to remove some hacks, but it has nothing to do with 
packaging and it's not the thing for near future.
> - Will you have a browser-like application along side this 
> installation to let users maintain their gecko engine. (Updates, 
> chromes, settings, plugins ...)
We want to hide Gecko before user. All settings have to be set the way 
IE does it and automatically passed to Gecko. Updates can be useful, but 
it's not really important ATM. And it can be done automatically so there 
is no need for a new tool for this.
>
> I have attempted a bit of this task based on SeaMonkey but I have come 
> to the conclusion that I'm not up to the task. Too many if(s) that I 
> don't have the answer to.
>
>
> There is this site <http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm> 
> which is the Official site for the Mozilla activeX Control. It looks 
> like it as stopped maintaining the Control. The only availability of 
> the 1.8 version of Gecko and the Control is in SeaMonkey. I have 
> written Adam Lock a short e-mail asking on the project status, 
> yesterday. I will keep you posted on his response. (??)
>
> Mike wrote ...
>
> > A native Linux copy of Gecko installed as part of, say, the 
> distributions Firefox?
>
> Please note that Firefox distribution according to Mozilla 
> documentation (See FAQ on link above) is not good because the Gecko is 
> statically linked and cannot be accessed from outside. The only 
> Project that can be used with current Gecko is SeaMonkey. (I may be 
> wrong about Linux-Gecko but I suspect they have the same problems as 
> on Windows. dynamic-linking load speed)
How about XUL Runner?
>
> It looks like all kind of people are looking for a Gecko SDK-kind 
> package. I did not find any. If any one knows of one please tell me.
>
There is one. It's called gecko-sdk. You may find it on Mozilla ftp:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.8b1/
I don't know how about other distros, but Gentoo provides a gecko-sdk 
package.

Jacek