Re: Mergeability of xwidget patch?

[joakim]

Daniel Hackney <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm the developer of Ezbl [1], a package which embeds the Uzbl web
> browser within Emacs. Ezbl depends on the xwidget patch by Joakim
> Verona, which is in the Emacs repo under the "xwidget" branch. I'd like
> to have Ezbl be available to people without them having to install a
> separate branch of Emacs (especially since it hasn't kept up with the
> trunk).
>
> I would like to know how close the xwidget patches are to being fit for
> the 24.1 trunk and what still needs to be done. I'm not much of a C
> programmer, and don't know the C-level internals of Emacs well, but I'm
> willing to learn for the sake of getting this patch completed and merged
> in. I think it would be a great feature to have in 24.1, but I heard the
> feature freeze was coming soon-ish, so I understand if it has to be
> pushed back.
>
> I'd love to have Ezbl available to those using the trunk and especially
> folks who use stable releases. I think it could be a powerful addition
> to the Emacs ecosystem by adding HTML5 support (through WebKit) into the
> mix. It's also possible to communicate with the embedded Uzbl instance
> through JavaScript, so there's a lot of potential there.

Sadly the patch is in a bad state. I was convinced composition was the
right way to go but in retrospect that is too complex to get working
robustly. I'm working on an MVC approach instead. I didn't choose that
path to start with because its more difficult with xembed clients, which
is the primary use-case people seems interested in.

For some xembed clients(like a patched version of Inkscape I have) thats
solveable because it allows several windows. I tried to have a look if
Webkit supports that as well but so far I haven't found a
solution. Mplayer doesn't either. those kind of clients will only have a
single working view, but that might not be too bad in practice.

Anyway I'm sorry for not giving the patch the love it deserves. Its
clearly still on my agenda, because I've spent a lot of time working on
a similar project to your Ezbl project, called Inkmacs. which fuses
Emacs and Inkscape. My goal is to embedded Inkscape in Emacs but so far
I've focused on controlling Inkscape through Dbus from Emacs. This has
required a lot of work on the Inkscape side in expanding and bugfixing
the Inkscape Dbus API.

I was in fact updating the xembed branch locally the other day and
starting to look at which commits to revert in order to backtrack to a
state where an MVC approach could be done.

I would be extatic to have more people help out with this. People do
show up but later vanish. I'm not sure why that is. If I need to explain
things better in the documentation I can try.

>
> Thanks,
>
> Daniel Hackney
>
> P.S. I'm not on the mailing list, so if you could CC me on replies,
> it'll be easier for me to communicate. Sorry for the inconvenience.
>
> [1] https://github.com/haxney/ezbl
>
> --
> Daniel M. Hackney

-- 
Joakim Verona