[gentoo-dev] eselect module for choosing between gnash and netscape-flash

[David Leverton]

Hi,

(Sorry if this is a dupe.  I tried sending it before, but it seems to
have disappeared into /dev/null.)

I wrote an eselect module for choosing between the browser plugins from
net-www/gnash and net-www/netscape-flash, and I was wondering if it
could be included in Gentoo (probably not in its current state...).

I haven't updated any ebuilds to use it yet, because some details are
still open for discussion, in particular the location the plugins should
be installed to.  If you want to test it in the meantime, create a
/usr/lib{,64,32}/nsbrowser/plugins/flash directory, and move the
existing Flash .so's from /usr/lib{,64,32}/nsbrowser/plugins to the new
directory.  eselect will name the plugins after their filenames, minus
the .so - possibly not very user-friendly, but this could be fixed by
either using a separate display name, or by installing them with nicer
names.

Note that changing the active plugin while the browser's running may or
may not work reliably, it's best to restart it each time.  Don't think
that's a bug in the module, I'm sure there are enough of those as it is. ;-)

Another issue is that it currently only works system-wide.  It could be
nice to let each user override the global preference, but I don't know
of any reliable way to do that.  At least SeaMonkey doesn't allow the
user's plugin directory to override the global one.

Other things: the multilib bits aren't tested much, since unless I've
missed something there's no way to build gnash in 32-bit mode on an
AMD64 system.  On the other hand, it works for 64-bit browsers with the
help of net-www/nspluginwrapper.  Speaking of which, it would be nice if
the two could be made to cooperate a bit better.  nspluginwrapper works
by generating stubs for all the plugins it finds at merge-time, but it
would need to know about the special plugin location.  There are two
ways I can think of to do this: either patch nspluginwrapper (yuck) or
make its ebuild juggle the plugins appropriately (slightly less yuck,
but wouldn't work if the administrator tries to generate the stibs
manually later on, which is needed if nspluginwrapper is installed
before Flash).  Any preferences?

That's all I can think of for now.  Any comments are appreciated.