Call Monday 24 Jan 2005

[Roland Mainz]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 12:16:56AM +0100, Roland Mainz wrote:
> > Parts of the xrx technology (like lbx, appgroup, security, Xaw8 etc.)
> > live in other parts of the monolithic tree. And as Keith Packard said:
> > There is no other place to put it, the Xorg monolithic tree is the
> > primary source of this code (excluding the CERN labs version of the
> > plugin (which is now more or less obsolete as the Xorg foundation now
> > ships with a working plugin enabled again)). And just splitting off the
> > source costs time which I don't have right now. Rememeber I only took
> > maintainership of the xrx stuff as there were several requests to get it
> > fixed and noone else cared so I did the job after syncing with Egbert.
> 
> What changed between 2001 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100005)
> and now, such that X.Org is now a more appropriate place for the plugin than
> Mozilla?

That patch was the original idea from my old employer to have it in
Mozilla, however the patch never really worked (outside Solaris) and to
get it working it would have required to import lots of X11 sources into
the Mozilla tree. Additionally Mozilla.org didn't like the license (the
plugin source is MIT/X.org, Mozilla wants MPL or MPL+GPL or MPL+LGPL).
And then it turned out that NS4.x+Konqueror wouldn't be covered by such
a patch and the whole idea of a Mozilla integration was dropped in favor
of an internal X11 codeline (shipping the plugin with the commercial
products which use it). In the meantime I switched jobs and CERN staff
independently (e.g. I wasn't involved in that work) developed a similar
patch for their environment. And around three years later then the issue
hit the new X.org bugzilla
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=950 being AFAIK the first
one, however I was ignoring that after forwaring the issue to the CERN
people (who failed to donate any of their patches to the (old) X.org
Consortium and did't had much faith that anything will move). After the
second bugzilla bug was filed I looked at it and simply fixed the issue
(which means the new patch in the X.org tree is a cleanroom
implementation as the old patch in the mozilla.org bugzilla was written
for my old employer) for now (that's why I said "... I am slightly
familar with that code..."... I worked already on that long long ago so
the whole stuff wasn't a total mystery for me :) until CERN moves their
patches into the X.org (Foundation) tree.

> Have you fixed https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=950 yet?

That was fixed with the newer patch. The new plugin works with Mozilla,
Konqueror and Netscape 4.x.

----

Bye,
Roland

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