[Edbrowse-dev] debian

[Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net>]

I spoke with Jean again - the next debian freeze is not for several months.
That's good; we are not "under the gun" to make these edbrowse changes.
We have a little time.
But I would like us to move forward still, making steady progress,
to make sure edbrowse is in the next debian release.
I don't think it was in the last one due to the js library incompatibility.
debian is the only commercial success I have enjoyed for any of my work,
ever, in the past 35 years.
And oddly enough I did not approach them at all;
they found edbrowse on their own, thought it a great program,
and wanted to package it.
But if I know they are putting it in their next release,
we can perhaps approach redhat and others and say,
"debian is including it, how about you?"
So we have some time, but we also want to move forward.
Not just to moz js 26, but also fixing some bugs that are in there.
Sadly, a few months is not enough time for the complete rewrite that I envision,
but time still to track down some of those seg faults that Adam referred
to, that could be due to js gc or some such.
I have to admit most seg faultts go away if you disable js.
Of course the bug that I fixed two days ago, an unterminated string
that could theoretically go on forever, might also seg fault,
though more often it just led to unpredictable results.
Anyways my hope is that 3.4.11 would be compatible
with the latest js, and farily stable.
Good enough for debian and perhaps other distros.

Something else I never figured out is how to get js
to march on even if it encounters an error.
It always stops executing, and that is often because of some visual
feature in the DOM that I did not implement.
The web page would likely work if it would just keep on going
after an error like this.
Or if I could resume execution after certain errors.
I could never find any way to do this, but I'll bet,
I haven't tested this yet but I'll bet that firefox,
using moz js, somehow continues to execute js even after an error.
It would be easy enough to test.
I make a web page containing this script.
Run it under firefox and see what you get.

alert("hello");
var x = missingVariable;
alert("world");

Short of the complete rewrite, the ability to march on after hitting an
undefined variable would make the biggest difference.

Meantime I will try to recall some of the sites I found
that produce a seg fault.

Thanks for all your work.

Karl Dahlke