Adding Spidermonkey 17esr to Raring

[Dmitry Shachnev]

According to <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/SpiderMonkey>,
"SpiderMonkey 1.8.5 is the most recent standalone source code
release", and that's what we already have in Debian/Ubuntu
(src:mozjs). I also don't see anything newer on their FTP.

Are you sure there was a new *standalone* release?

--
Dmitry Shachnev

On 2/28/13, Tim <tim at feathertop.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>   Finally after about 2 years Mozilla are releasing a version of the
> standalone spidermonkey engine. This release is based off the engine from
> Firefox 17esr. It has taken quite a long time to get to this stage, and I
> was hoping it would happen earlier in the cycle, but I would still
> like to get this into raring if at all possible. My motivation for this is
> the great improvements it brings to gnome-shell.
>
> This release fixes a number of high impact issues including greater
> performance, greatly reduces memory leaks, and finally solves the long
> standing and quite common issue with Garbage Collection deadlocks. I ported
> gjs to this engine a few months ago and while it hasnt landed
> upstream yet, the plan for 3.8 is to branch gjs and release 2 versions of
> gjs, one for each engine.  This new gjs is API compatible with 3.6,
> and in fact works great with gnome-shell 3.6, so essentially it would be
> great to bring these improvements into raring.
>
> There are big API/ABI breaks in this release compared to previous 185
> release. Currently none of the other rdepends have been ported as far as I
> know, and its probably not realistic to get all of them ported this cycle.
> Mostly the porting is easy enough, however it does result in quite
> large diff's so would really want to be done upstream, as it would probably
> be a nightmare to maintain these as Distro patches. Add to this
> CouchDB is fundamentally incompatible with this new release, due to their
> use of illegal javascript syntax (in 185 enforcement of this was
> optional) as a core feature of their user scripts.
>
> Given the above, replacing/upgrading the old package is simply not going to
> be feasible this cycle. I propose adding this new engine as an
> additional library, I discussed this on IRC a bit with seb128 and
> chriscoulson, however they were unsure about whether this is something that
> could want to go ahead and suggested that I raise it here for more
> widespread discussion. Main issues raised were overall its a low priority
> but
> also some security concerns.
>
> Hopefully now with all the patches on their way into the upstream mozilla
> code-base, future releases will be more regular, they will be tracking
> the firefox esr releases. Although not really guaranteed just yet, it is
> planned for some  point releases over the life of each version.
> Probably issues with overlapping versions will continue to be a problem
> until the JS C API settles down, next release 24 will again break all
> rdepends.
>
> - Tim
>
>
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