Status of web browsing in Sugar on Ubuntu Maverick

[Lucian Branescu]

On 24 August 2010 12:21, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> 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.

As a maintainer, I very much prefer webkitgtk to hulahop & pyxpcom. In
the process of porting it, I've significantly cut down on the LOC,
perhaps 1-2KLOC.

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

And just use Browse-hulahop everywhere it still works.