I've been playing with XULRunner with Python and have hit a number of
issues that are  making life difficult. I have not been able to find
any answers yet.

For background my project is an assistive technology called Jambu that
will give alternative input users first class access, starting with
access to Firefox on Windows. Adding Python to XULRunner allows access
to the a11y APIs MSAA & IA2 custom COM interfaces through comtypes
(Firefox does not implement iDispatch).

1) Is a debugger available? Dump() is very primitive and slow. I have
the Venkman Javascript debugger working and a crude Python console but
obviously really want full python debugging. Would it be easy to plug
in pywin32's debugger say?

2) How to create a debug build of XULRunner when building a debug
version raises requirements on the debug version of Python. I can
build that but it seems I would need a debug build of all packages (I
only use xpcom, nsdom, comtypes and  pywin32 at the moment). I tried
various hacks to keep Python non-debug or not using the python_d.dll
as I want to debug XUL not python but they all failed. Plus I worry
about mixing debug and non-debug runtimes across modules.

3) How do we deploy XULRunner + Python. This looks tricky as ideally a
minimal python installation such as pyinstaller or py2exe give would
be created. A fundamental question exists for how XULRunner will be
deployed anyway, it was going to be part of Firefox 3, but this
becomes a new XULRunner unless some runtime binding to Python can be
done.

4) Finally what is the status of XULRunner  with Python. It seems to
be beyond bleeding edge and not officially supported at least from my
experience so far.

My test code is available on http://fullmeasure.co.uk/mozilla/jambu/

Thanks

-- 
Steve Lee
www.fullmeasure.co.uk
www.oatsoft.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk
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