Meeting 2014 12 15

Servo Meeting 2014-12-15

Agenda items

• Please log vacation PTO! You have the 24th, 25th, and 1st (in the US? yes, no 24th in UK (but 26th :)) - see local https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/PR/Mozilla+Benefits) plus your birthday if you didn't take it this year (larsberg)
• B2S status: landed mwu's Gonk port! Next: clean up to be more like Android + buildbot (larsberg)
• Rustup status?
• Make Servo's build process directory-isolated - i.e., Cargo+snapshots in-tree? (larsberg)
• Firefox.html (mbrubeck, paul?) https://github.com/paulrouget/firefox.html
• HTMLElement.style review volunteer (jdm)

Attending

larsberg, jack, jdm, mbrubeck, pcwalton, Manishearth, SimonSapin, zwarich, pcwalton (muted)

Administrivia

• larsberg: Remember to take vacations/PTO! Also, we met in Portland with Martin Best (product management). He liked the idea of doing image decoders in Rust. He advised us not to look at working around the Gecko graphics stack because the team is really busy with a lot of stuff. Anything that would help with page load perf and jank would be very welcome though. He also mentioned that in the long term vision of a browser based on Servo, some form of add-ons will be a must-have, not optional.
• zwarich: Safari and Chrome have more restrictive but more robust add-on architectures, compared to Firefox/Gecko.
• larsberg: He also talked to us about being prepared for an influx of people once we have something that developers can use in Gecko to write Rust components.

Boot to Servo

• larsberg: gw reviewed mwu's patches and got them landed. Still need to get a builder. Right now you need to mess around with directories to do the build; we want to make it easier to build out of the box, like Android.

Rustup

• jdm: It's really close! Going to get it tonight, probably. Just iterating through script right now.
• jack: Other platforms?
• jdm: I got OSX to the same level as Linux. Most of the platform-specific stuff is updated now.
• larsberg: Probably need Android. Oh, and Android on OSX is broken (building some crates for host instead of target).
• jack: any blockers?
• jdm: Nope, it's mechanical.
• larsberg: Hopefully we can do one after this soon.
• pcwalton: Watch the proc() removal after this one.
• jack: proc's functionality is all still there in different forms; just a bit more restrictive about choosing whether to copy versus reference.
• zwarich: Have to be explict now.
• jack: Hopefullyl don't need mixed mode.
• SimonSapin: Also \u escaping constraints have changed. I have a giant sed command ready now for it.

In-tree builds

• larsberg: We got a lot of feedback from people who were surprised that Servo's build system dumps stuff in the home directory by default (~/.servo, ~/.cargo). We probably need a mode where everything lives in the source tree.
• jack: We store snapshots out of tree. Maybe a servo option to store in-tree? Second part is cargo. Maybe need to have a cargo mode that puts things in-tree & use the same logic.
• mbrubeck: I moved some of it out of tree; I'd be in favor of moving it back in by default as long as there's a servobuild.example to help. The people who benefit are the same who are doing a .servobuild configuration file.
• jack: Is there a bug upstream in Cargo for this yet?
• larsberg: Maybe also would smooth out the Rust upgrades a bit. Submodules were nice because the files were just there and could be modified.
• jack: Gecko build team also wants offline Cargo. Because if you have overrides for everything, it still goes to GitHub, which is totally not allowed since the Gecko builders are not supposed to access the internet. Also, when GitHub got blocked from Russia, it broke the whole toolchain.

Firefox.html

• mbrubeck: Put it in partly in case Paul can make the meeting, but he's in Paris. Paul Rouget has made a project to implement Firefox-like UI from scratch in HTML+JS ( https://github.com/paulrouget/firefox.html ). One of the first things people asked is: can you run it in Servo? He has started asking about what is needed to do that and whether anybody's interested. Firefox.html is a B2G-style web app and runs in the web app runtime in desktop firefox. Uses the Browser API (same as Gaia), which is an iframe attribute that gives it superpowers to add extra isolation to the contents (no window.top, outer window, etc.) and some extra APIs so the page embedding it can tell it to go back/forward/reload/navigate. Main piece we don't implement, though it looks like we could if we had working iframes. Probably a lot of other things in CSS and DOM features.
• jack: Is it all flexbox? Absolutely positioned elements? What CSS features?
• mbrubeck: Mostly flexbox stuff, so we'd need that.
• larsberg: Gaia supposedly uses flexbox pretty extensively, too.
• mbrubeck: It's a rough translation of Firefox's theme and layout (using the old XUL model). Lots of what Firefox.html will need overlaps with what Gaia homescreen and other apps will need. Thought this might have some overlap with the B2S work.
• jack: Sounds like it will fit in with the Q1 deliverables, though we need MozBrowser in the roadmap.
• jdm: I'm considering suggesting it to ted... might be a good project.
• larsberg: Does it have a spec, or is Ms2ger going to make us write one?
• mbrubeck: ted was at our build meetings because he's one of the peers, but he has worked on everything. He also ported Firefox to iOS (the unshippable FF for iOS!).
• jack: The github page has lots more info since he last put it up; how do the tabs work? drawing the window.close buttons?
• mbrubeck: WebApp.rt does it.
• simonsapin: It is a little bit soon for drawing something in a top-level pseudowindow.

HTMLElement.style

• jdm: ms2ger has been going through the PR for this. Would be nice to have someone else who has time (who can learn about this) look through and review the work. This is another call for volunteers!
• larsberg: What does wearing this hat cause to happen later?
• jack: I volunteer.