A few weeks ago, I posted about a shell script I had written to help automate the building of an extension for Firefox. Building an extension’s not a hard process, but it can be a pain to do over and over because it involves zipping some files and putting them into a directory, then zipping that directory and another file into another archive. It’s just kind of a pain. This week, I’ve been hit with a need to generate different versions of my extension for different platforms in order to accommodate styling differences among the platforms. (Macs have nice rounded text inputs for some of their widgets, for example.) I could find no way to do a simple sniff to determine what CSS file to use for a given XUL document within an extension, so I figured I’d need to generate separate packages for each platform, complete with specialized style sheets. So I was looking at having to generate packages for each platform. Even with my nifty little build script, that was going to be kind of a pain and was going to necessitate keeping three copies of my code and making updates in three places. What a pain.

To get around this, I wrote a new script this morning that builds packages from a base directory and incorporates changes per platform. So I make core changes to one code base and make changes to platform-specific code only within the given platform’s directories. When I run the build script, for each platform specified in the script, it copies the base files into a temp directory, then copies platform-specific files in on top of them. Then it builds and exports the package to an export directory specified within the script. It should make this whole process substantially less painful. The script appears below.

#!/bin/sh
##############################################################
#                                                            #
# Multi-platform Firefox extension build script.             #
#                                                            #
#    Author:    Daryl L. L. Houston                          #
#               http://daryl.learnhouston.com                #
#   Version:    1.0                                          #
# Rev. Date:    Tue Apr 12 11:01:51 EDT 2005                 #
#                                                            #
#     Usage:    Current directory should contain directories #
#               "base" and platform-specific directories.    #
#               Base directory contains install.rdf and      #
#               files common to all platforms. For example:  #
#                                                            #
#                  + contents/                               #
#                    + r2/                                   #
#                      - contents.rdf                        #
#                      - overlay.xul                         #
#                      - overlay.js                          #
#                  + skin/                                   #
#                    + r2/                                   #
#                      - r2.css                              #
#                  + locale/                                 #
#                    + en_US/                                #
#                      + r2/                                 #
#                        - overlay.dtd                       #
#                  - install.rdf                             #
#                                                            #
#              Platform-specific directories contain files   #
#              in addition to or different from base files.  #
#              So if the Mac package needs a different       #
#              stylesheet, you create the skin hierarchy     #
#              under a directory named (eg) "mac" and put    #
#              the Mac stylesheet in there. It will be       #
#              dropped into the Mac package in place of the  #
#              base package's style sheet.                   #
#                                                            #
#              Packages are named (eg) "extname_mac.xpi"     #
#              where the "extension" variable below is       #
#              set to "extname" and are placed in the        #
#              directory specified in "export_path" below.   #
#                                                            #
##############################################################

#Set these variables.

#Final export directory.
export_path='/home/houston/code/extensions/xpi'

#Package name. This should match chrome:name from contents.rdf
extension='r2'

#Platform directories. Will be used to create final xpi names.
#Corresponding directories must also exist.
dirs=(mac windows linux)

#No need to edit below this line.

for idx in $(seq 0 $((${#dirs[@]} - 1)))
do
	#Need to make a temporary build work space
	mkdir temp

	echo ' '
	echo '===== '${dirs[$idx]} '===='

	#Remove old xpi files.
	oldxpi=$export_path'/'$extension'_'${dirs[$idx]}'.xpi'
	if [ -e $oldxpi ]
	then
		echo '+ Removing ' $oldxpi
		rm $oldxpi
	fi

	#Copy common files into build directory
	echo '+ Copying files into ' ${dirs[$idx]} ' temp build directory'
	cp -Rf base/* temp/

	#Now copy (and force) files from the current platform build directory
	#into temp directory. This adds new files and overwrites base files.
	cp -Rf ${dirs[$idx]}/* temp/

	#Make chrome directory
	if [ -d temp/chrome ]
	then
		rm -rf temp/chrome
	fi
	mkdir temp/chrome

	#Now go into temp directory and zip up the files copied there, name the zip
	#with a .jar extension, and move into the chrome directory.
	cd temp
	echo '+ Creating jar for '${dirs[$idx]}
	file=$extension.jar
	zip -r $file content skin locale
	mv $file chrome/

	#Create the xpi by zipping install.rdf and chrome
	#and giving the file a .xpi extension.
	echo '+ Creating package for '${dirs[$idx]}
	file=$extension'_'${dirs[$idx]}'.xpi'
	zip -r $file install.rdf chrome/

	#Move the newly generated extension to the export directory
	echo '+ Moving xpi file to output directory for '${dirs[$idx]}
	mv $file $export_path

	#Go up a directory and remove temp directory in anticipation
	#of iteration for next platform. Lather, rinse, repeat
	cd ..
	rm -rf temp

done

Until today, every time I’ve clicked a mailto link in Firefox, the clunky old Evolution email program has started churning, and I’ve smacked myself on the forehead and cursed as I waited for that behemoth of an application to load. You see, I use the lightweight Thunderbird, which loads in an instant and is as flexible and powerful as I need it to be. So I wait for Evolution to finish loading a compose window, close that down, copy the mailto link into a Thunderbird composition window, and write my email. It’s a pain every time.

One of the RSS feeds I keep an eye on is Linux Journal’s, and an article entitled “Ten Mysteries of about:config” caught my eye there today. It’s a decent little article by Nigel McFarlane, author of Firefox Hacks, which I just received in the mail this week and which looks promising. One of the mysteries Nigel explains is how to set a default mail client in Firefox on Linux (it’s easy enough in Windows because it’s governed at the system level). It takes only three steps:

• Open about:config in your browser.
• Set the preference named “network.protocol-handler.external.mailto” to true; if it doesn’t exist, create it and set it to true.
• Create a preference named “network.protocol-handler.app.mailto” and set it to the path to Thunderbird. In my case, this is /usr/local/thunderbird/thunderbird.

That’s all there is to it. When I did this and clicked a mailto link, a Thunderbird composition window shot to the foreground and I was in business.

So let’s just say that while I’m very happy at my current job, if somebody wanted to pay me a comparable salary to sit on my ass all day every day doing things, as I felt like it, like writing the next great visionary novel or even just a few little mildly successful bits of doggerel, I’d drop the day job in a heartbeat.

This message brought to you in part by “Chapter and Verse,” a roughly annual newsletter put out by the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in which newsletter can be found two students who graduated with me whom I knew, one of whom has gone on to be a Grammy nominee and one poet who, after having edited a respected magazine while earning her master’s degree, has gone on to continue publishing her own work and to become an instructor in the program from which I myself graduated. I propose for this nifty little publication the following motto:

Chapter and Verse, making you feel like shit today, tomorrow, and the next day. And the next. And the next. And so on.

Google’s April Fools joke isn’t as funny as it appears they think it is, but it’s pretty cute and is full of tech-insider jokes and references to various perceptions of Google, such as that they’re getting into everything nowadays and that their invite-only Gmail deal was sort of wacky. It’s probably worth a five minute read.