Status of web browsing in Sugar on Ubuntu Maverick

[David Farning]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 3:38 AM, Lucian Branescu
<lucian.branescu at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24 August 2010 03:24, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Currently, we are nearing the deadline for the Ubuntu release. The
>> Feature Freeze has already passed, so any new packages will need release
>> team approval.
>>
>> As-is, we do not have either Browse (xulrunner) or Surf (webkit)
>> included in Ubuntu.
>>
>> Browse depends on python-hulahop, which is a wrapper around pyxpcom.
>> From what I understand, pyxpcom was dropped from upstream xulrunner.
>> Efforts have been made to package pyxpcom, and there are debs available
>> for Debian, but as of today it has not been accepted into Debian or Ubuntu.
>>
>> pyxpcom currently has no upstream maintainer. From my discussions with
>> members of the Ubuntu team, it seems that it will not be included in
>> Maverick unless assurances are made that it will be kept updated with
>> new upstream Firefox releases, per the new Mozilla support model.
>>
>> Surf depends on Python bindings of Webkit, which are packaged, but as of
>> current in my testing Surf crashes on clicking on a link. (in Debian, I
>> also need to test in Ubuntu) This makes the browser generally unusable.
>> The long term plan, from what I understand it, is to move over to
>> GObject introspection rather than the language-specific Python bindings.
>
> Surf seems to segfault in everything BUT Ubuntu. At its core, there's
> a webkitgtk bug, made worse by a few pywebkitgtk bugs. webkitgtk
> upstream is working to fix the bug.
>
> Also, Surf doesn't support a lot of things, like cookies. That's
> because there's no (static) binding for libsoup.
>
> So yeah, the sooner everyone moves to PyGI, the better. But there are
> bugs in both webkitgtk and PyGI that need to get fixed before anything
> will work and that may take more than a development cycle.
>

Based on the current state and approaching deadlines let's focus on
Surf on Debian and Ubuntu.  Since neither browse nor surf work well on
Ubuntu, we are better off focusing our limited resources on Surf which
looks to be the future rather than browse which looks difficult to
support going forward.

For a fall back position.... be can just follow OLE Nepal's lead and
package firefox until surf is ready.

david