Packaging Firefox extensions (Finnish spell checking)
Ville-Pekka Vainio
vpivaini at cs.helsinki.fi
Fri May 23 21:17:23 UTC 2008
Hi all,
I've been packaging Finnish spell checking support for Fedora (see
http://voikko.sourceforge.net/) and now I've packaged a Firefox extension
which uses the Voikko library to do spell checking in Finnish. My initial
testing package can be found here:
http://vpv.fedorapeople.org/packages/mozvoikko/
What do you think about packaging Firefox extensions, are they allowed and
would someone be interested in reviewing this package if I submitted it?
Beagle-firefox is probably the only Firefox extension packaged currently in
Fedora and I made my package so that it matches the locations etc. used in
that package.
Of course the extensions can be installed from Mozilla's web site as well, but
especially with this extension there would be a couple of benefits if it was
shipped as an RPM: It can be built against the libvoikko and libmalaga
libraries available in Fedora and it uses the Finnish data files available in
Fedora (malaga-suomi-voikko).
The extension version which probably will be shipped from Mozilla's web site
needs to have the libraries and the data files compiled in it, because it
can't assume much from the target system. Thus it will probably be much
larger (the uncompressed data files seem to be around 8 megabytes) whereas
the extension built to call the stuff already in the system takes around 70
kilobytes (uncompressed). Also, if the extension is installed via Firefox
from Mozilla's site, it will only be installed for the single user, so if the
system has for example 5 users and all of them install the extension for
themselves, the difference will be even bigger.
--
Ville-Pekka Vainio
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