Re: [Gnash-dev] Help with building a XPI

[Rob Savoye]

Sylvain Beucler wrote:

  I got motivated, and spent the day fixing the packaging targets in
Gnash for XPI, RPM, and Debs. Thanks for getting me going! :-) It all
works much better than it used to. I changed from using time stamps to
using the bzr revno, and also added support for using the actual branch
name from bzr to replace several places where it used to be hardcoded.
Now package building is 100% automated and self configuring. This will
all help towards my goal of getting our build farm to crank out a
variety of binary packages every night.

> I think this field is best used to match the target Debian release,
> rather than express the actual status of the package (which is usually
> part of the URL, e.g. "../snapshots/..").

  I just fixed this one. Naming is now more like
"mozilla-plugin-gnash_10795xpi_i386.deb"

> I didn't check extensively in this particular case, but normally a
> file is only part of one package.

  As I got all the packages building again today after changing things
heavily, tomorrow I'll dig through the contents in more detail and make
them all consistent. I just checked in a big patch, so "make rpm
snapshot-deb xpi" all work the new way now. Nothing like a day spent
hacking on Makefiles... :-)

> Any piece of documentation you would recommend? :)

  I found very little for C++ based plugins, most docs only cover
javascript ones. Our XPCOM code is based on the C++ example I found in
the Firefox 3 sources. Gnash's usage of XPCOM is very simple, we just
want the path to the users profile directory the "plugin pretending to
be an extension", so we can fork & exec the standalone player. Once
XPCOM works well, there are other things we can use it for in the future
for better integration into the browser. Everybody says XPCOM is going
away, but we're all stuck with it for now.

> Incidentally, isn't it possible to bundle gtk-gnash in the .so?

  No. Most plugins are completely embedded in the .so, including the
Adobe plugin. For Gnash, this led to problems with too many context
switches between Firefox, Gnash, X11, and OpenGL, which effected
performance. So the Gnash plugin is a thin layer that starts the
standalone player (gtk-gnash), and uses XEmbed under GTK to make Gnash
render in the browser window.

        - rob -