Feedback for White Star 30

[dbsoft]

Pale Moon 30 has been released, and it looked like it was a major update.

However I browsed through the code changes and that vast majority of the changes are the removal of the following:

Mac support
Android support
Clang support
EME Encrypted Media Extensions
WebRTC Real Time Communication
Telemetry

Plus a bunch of file reorganization, and renaming such as UXP to GRE (Goanna Runtime Environment)

Obviously I am not removing Mac and Clang support from my tree, as it would make White Star no longer function on MacOS.

EME and WebRTC are not enabled by default in White Star or Pale Moon but having them as options in the tree always seemed nice to me.

I'm thinking of just cherry picking the new features without the massive removals (except for maybe Telemetry) and file reorganization:

Global Privacy Control (Do Not Track) support
Updated emoji support
Selection.setBaseAndExtent() support
queueMicroTask() support
Firefox UUID support for extensions

The library updates:

Cubeb (My library is already updated, they reverted theirs due to Windows problems)
sqllite
cairo

... and of course the security fixes.

Anyone have any thoughts before I start on this?

Brian

[noobsoftware]

I wonder if Silver will even build if there are too many changes. That's my biggest worry.

[KlarkKentThe3rd]

Do what you have to do to make the thing work.

[dbsoft]

Ok so... basically what I am saying is that like 80% of the code changes in Pale Moon 30 are removing stuff I don't think should be removed, and rearranging the files.

I am not in their heads but the reorganization is probably due to one or both of these things:

Trying to prove Goanna is something new and not basically just a fork of Gecko.
Trying to make it difficult for people like me to do forks of Pale Moon.

To me, I would like to keep it organized like Mozilla so changes from them are easier to incorporate.

What I have been doing up to this point, is just following what Pale Moon has been doing and skipping any changes that would break White Star for Mac.

The two options I have are:

To keep doing what I have been... reorganizing the files to match Pale Moon and just skip any change that breaks White Star.
Or... I can just take the changes of interest and put them into my existing tree.

The first option would keep White Star as basically just a Mac version of Pale Moon.
The second option would cause more divergence with the Pale Moon code base, but less divergence from Mozilla.
The second option would be less work to get 30 released.
The second option would make it easier to port changes from Mozilla, like I am doing with my new clang changes.
The second option would give me an excuse to start releasing Windows and Linux versions of White Star.

Obviously, I am leaning towards the second option at this point, but I wanted to get community feedback before I did it.

Brian

[KlarkKentThe3rd]

2nd option sounds nice.

[dbsoft]

Okay, if no one has any objections to that plan... I will start working on that today.

Update: Work has begun... and despite claims in the Pale Moon release notes, sqlite and cairo were not updated at all. Only libcubeb was, which I had already done a few versions ago.

The only changes I see are in the build system due to the changed locations of the files.

[dbsoft]

So I don't know if anyone else has noticed, might not check the Pale Moon forums anymore, but apparently Pale Moon 30 is very broken right now... largely due to their seemingly ridiculous reorganization of their tree... it broke language packs and some other things.

Then there was drama, between the Pale Moon leaders, resulting in the removal of the add-ons site.

I think I am just going t hold off on White Star 30 right now, until things settle a bit on the Pale Moon side... since a White Star 30 release right now would have severe issues.

I apologize for people who were looking forward to it, but I don't want to release a broken version, and have to waste even more effort fixing things once Pale Moon hashes things out.

[KlarkKentThe3rd]

It is generally unwise to not check the PM site, I do so every day.

[dbsoft]

Looks like they are switching back to the Dual GUID system, where Pale Moon's GUID is the main and it also supports Firefox's GUID. Which is kind of what I expected the would do originally, so I will release White Star 30 based on the code of this Pale Moon when it gets released.

The only remaining concern is the language packs, apparently the file layout is important for the language packs, and I cannot follow the layout changes that they did in the Pale Moon/browser component... since part of the reason Firefox had the layout it did was because of Mac support.

I'll have to wait and see what happens when I try to use the new language packs for version 30, but it is possible we might need to have modified language packs for White Star.... but again I won't know for sure until I try them.

Update: Also looks like they will be releasing a security update to 29.4.5, so that will likely be the next release... then skipping ahead to 30.1 for our first White Star release in the 30 milestone.

[KlarkKentThe3rd]

Now we know what will happen. No White Star 30 ever, it's Windows 10 all over again.