[Gllug] Issues with Hotplug && Auto-mounting

[Christian Smith]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Richard Jones wrote:

>On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 04:23:53PM +0000, Christian Smith wrote:
>> Not entirely. The application framework is written mostly in (awful) C++,
>> using the Mozilla version of COM (XPCOM).
>
>> At my company, we built our cross platform (Windows, Solaris, Linux,
>> HP-UX, AIX) installer on top of the Mozilla framework, using custom C++
>> components and XUL and JS to tie it all together. Gives us the nice
>> benefits of essentially the same installer on Windows and UNIX, with a
>> small custom layer to tie into MSI or a proprietry UNIX package manager.
>
>I'm glad you managed to make it work, because about 2 years ago when
>we were exploring going the same route, the framework was incredibly
>obscure, barely documented, and rapidly changing.  I hope it's got
>better since then.


It works very nicely, most of the time. We're using GTK+ 1.2 to keep the
distributables size down, and that has caused headaches on AIX and HP-UX
to the point that we've disabled the GUI on those platforms. But on the
whole, we're impressed and get browser and scripting functionality thrown
in.

If I was doing it again, I'd consider using a custom Qt application
instead, as it'd be much more light weight and maintainable. XPCOM is the
worst C++ I've seen since working on ActiveX components, so it's nice to
get back to a sane C environment. They made the mistake of giving XPCOM a
MS like C++ wrapper, resulting in code that is horrible to maintain and
debug.

Still, it gave me and a colleague the chance to play with some relatively
new technologies, and SQLite was a huge find in this project. We want to
push SQLite to other parts of the organisation, as it fits our needs
perfectly.


>
>Can you run Mozilla applications without having to install them as
>root now?


Yes. We have no problems in that sense. We based our installer on
Mozilla 1.7.x.


>
>Rich.
>

Christian


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