[Enigmail] building the IPC library with xulrunner-dev instead of a full build tree

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

howdy enigmail folks--

I'm new to the build process for enigmail, so this question itself might
be full of errors or misconceptions.  I'd be grateful for any
corrections people have.

Until mozilla bug 68702 [0] is closed, i'm trying to sort out a simple
way to make sure that the IPC extension to the mozilla suite can be
cleanly packaged and redistributed.  I want to see this happen because i
want to see both engimail and firegpg well-supported by free software
distributions (i'm focusing in particular on debian), and both of these
packages appear to depend on this extension.

The problem that i've run into is that most instructions to build the
IPC library (e.g. [1]) suggest building it from within a pre-built (or
half-built) mozilla source tree.

The way that debian (and ubuntu and other debian derivatives) build ad
distribute binary versions makes this kind of approach awkward and
difficult to maintain as long as the IPC library being adopted upstream.
 It's difficult (and discouraged, for maintenance and security reasons)
to use the source from package A during the build for package B.

However, debian distributes a xulrunner-dev package which appears to be
intended in part to support builds of xpcom extensions (i believe this
is also known as gecko SDK).  The ipc library is technically an xpcom
extension, right?

So: would it be possible to build the ipc extension against
xulrunner-dev directly, without setting up a full mozilla build-tree and
half-configuring it?  I'd be happy to experiment with ways to do that,
if anyone can point me in the right direction.

I've tried already with no success, but i have no experience building
xpcom extensions, and i'm leery of superstitiously tampering with the
source just to get the build to work smoothly.  The latest version i
could find [1] does compile cleanly if i have a pre-compiled external
source tree, i just want to make it build from the system-installed
development headers instead.  Is this trivial to do, and i'm just
ignorant of the switches/settings to use?  Or am i chasing a
fundamentally impossible goal?

Thanks for any advice you can give.  I'm happy to answer questions or to
clarify if what i've written makes no sense.

Regards,

	--dkg

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68702
[1] http://blog.getfiregpg.org/2008/10/17/how-to-compile-the-ipc-library/
[2] http://mozilla-enigmail.org/ipc/

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 890 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/enigmail/attachments/20090313/4e508445/attachment.bin>