RDF module ownership

[Axel Hecht]

Hi,

I'm still acting module owner of RDF, but the changes that gone through
that piece of code are just modernizing xpcom and mfbt/C++ usage. That's
stuff I don't know nor have practice in. I'm just forwarding the review
requests to :bs, who's peer.

Thus, I don't think it makes sense for me to further claim module ownership.

Should we just leave the module unowned? Any better proposal?

Axel

[Kyle Huey]

On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 6:30 AM, Axel Hecht <ax...@pike.org> wrote:

> Any better proposal?
>

Kill RDF?

- Kyle

[Dave Townsend]

Patches accepted Kyle

> _______________________________________________
> dev-planning mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning
>

[Axel Hecht]

A proposal that I can only support in spirit, but not in code.

To be precise: I still think that RDF is a good idea. Sadly, the way
mozilla adopted RDF, and the version of RDF it adopted, weren't a great
idea. RDF/XML, the lack of vocabulary, etc, all things that ended up
hurting RDF more than helping it.

If there was anyone lobbying for RDF, they'd lobby for killing what we
call RDF today, so that they can get support for the real thing in the
add-on ecosystem, and potentially eventually even into the tree. But
that'd be an argument based on a value proposition then, not the value
proposition way back when.

Axel

[Henri Sivonen]

On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 5:07 PM, Kyle Huey <m...@kylehuey.com> wrote:
> Kill RDF?

Yes, please!

Do we have a list of tasks that remain as blockers for removing RDF?

Recently, I have removed two instances of RDF usage (fallback encoding
UI and character encoding menu). If all developers did this kind of
modest amount of RDF removal, maybe we could get rid of all the
remaining uses.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsiv...@hsivonen.fi
https://hsivonen.fi/

[Kyle Huey]

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 12:32 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsiv...@hsivonen.fi> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 5:07 PM, Kyle Huey <m...@kylehuey.com> wrote:
> > Kill RDF?
>
> Yes, please!
>
> Do we have a list of tasks that remain as blockers for removing RDF?
>

Bug 833098 has a (probably incomplete) list.

- Kyle

[Melvin Carvalho]

+1

RDF has moved on a bit since Mozilla's initial implementation of RDF/XML.
The XML flavour of RDF never really made the mainstream, imho.

The tooling and options are slightly better now, including a JSON flavour
which is more popular with developers.

The director of the W3C has been working, in his spare time, on a free
software implementation of RDF in firefox [1]

As a volunteer in the free software community I try and help with this
code, and would be happy to answer any questions. Please pop in to #swig
on freenode irc, if you'd like to follow up on this, or have any specific
issues that could help to be addressed.

[1] https://github.com/linkeddata/tabulator-firefox


>
>
> Axel

[Axel Hecht]

On 1/7/14 9:32 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 5:07 PM, Kyle Huey <m...@kylehuey.com> wrote:
>> Kill RDF?
>
> Yes, please!
>
> Do we have a list of tasks that remain as blockers for removing RDF?
>
> Recently, I have removed two instances of RDF usage (fallback encoding
> UI and character encoding menu). If all developers did this kind of
> modest amount of RDF removal, maybe we could get rid of all the
> remaining uses.
>

I think the tough ones will be in mailnews code, there are still some
left over there. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420506 has
that list, and then there's the porting to SeaMonkey of that work.

There was good progress on that front for a while, but then TB moved to
its current state, and I don't think the remaining work has been tackled
since.

Axel

[Benjamin Smedberg]

As the guy who's reviewing patches anyway, I'm happy to own it for now.

It's clear that we want to remove this code from the Firefox build, and
I welcome people who want to help make that happen, although I'm
unlikely to do most of that work myself unless it becomes an important
goal for some other reason.

After the code is removed from Firefox, we can move it into mailnews at
which point I would want to hand it over to a mailnews owner.

--BDS

[Axel Hecht]

Sounds like a plan, and thanks for volunteering.

If there are no objections, I'll take this proposal to .governance in
the next few days.

Axel

[Philip Chee]

On 07/01/2014 17:34, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

> RDF has moved on a bit since Mozilla's initial implementation of RDF/XML.
> The XML flavour of RDF never really made the mainstream, imho.
>
> The tooling and options are slightly better now, including a JSON flavour
> which is more popular with developers.
>
> The director of the W3C has been working, in his spare time, on a free
> software implementation of RDF in firefox [1]

Can we not use the Redland libraries? They are currently dual licensed
LGPL/Apache2. They were originally LGPL/MPL1.1. Getting the author to
re-license as MPL2 should be no problem.

Phil

--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 1/10/2014 9:22 AM, Philip Chee wrote:
> On 07/01/2014 17:34, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>> RDF has moved on a bit since Mozilla's initial implementation of RDF/XML.
>> The XML flavour of RDF never really made the mainstream, imho.
>>
>> The tooling and options are slightly better now, including a JSON flavour
>> which is more popular with developers.
>>
>> The director of the W3C has been working, in his spare time, on a free
>> software implementation of RDF in firefox [1]
> Can we not use the Redland libraries? They are currently dual licensed
> LGPL/Apache2. They were originally LGPL/MPL1.1. Getting the author to
> re-license as MPL2 should be no problem.

Use Redland for what, exactly? It's not that hard to implement an RDF
library in JS either from webpage script or as an extension. Currently
we have no features that want to use RDF in the browser UI or the web
core, so I don't any reason to be discussing specifics of library
implementations.

--BDS

[Henri Sivonen]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:22 PM, Philip Chee <phili...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can we not use the Redland libraries?

Who is "we"? m-c developers or c-c developers? Surely for the price of
swapping the RDF machinery in m-c for another is in the same ballpark
as getting rid of the remaining RDF uses in m-c.

[Axel Hecht]

On 1/10/14 3:22 PM, Philip Chee wrote:
> On 07/01/2014 17:34, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>> RDF has moved on a bit since Mozilla's initial implementation of RDF/XML.
>> The XML flavour of RDF never really made the mainstream, imho.
>>
>> The tooling and options are slightly better now, including a JSON flavour
>> which is more popular with developers.
>>
>> The director of the W3C has been working, in his spare time, on a free
>> software implementation of RDF in firefox [1]
>
> Can we not use the Redland libraries? They are currently dual licensed
> LGPL/Apache2. They were originally LGPL/MPL1.1. Getting the author to
> re-license as MPL2 should be no problem.
>
> Phil
>

PS: Redland implements the spec, and our remaining callsites into our
RDF impl depend on non-compatible behavior. So no, we can't use those libs.

Axel