Gears do not work in prism

[Andrei Dziahel]

Binary package hint: gears

I've installed gears package, and prism applications show Gears addon in addon list.

But when I try to install, say, Gmail Offline, or GReader offline, or anything uses gears in prism, relevant webapps ask me to install Gears, not "Allow using Gears to this application?"

[hackel (hackel)]

I can confirm this bug. I thought it was because of /usr/lib/gears/stub.js not detecting Prism (expecting a 3.5 version string), so I fixed that and it still does not work, with a "No Local Store Client Found" error.

[Andrei Dziahel (develop7)]

Can anyone to point me where to dig source code? I really want ot fix this bug and I'm ready to invest some time into it.

TIA.

[Andrei Dziahel (develop7)]

@hackel, BTW, how did you get (or where have you picked) that error message you mentioned?

[Andrei Dziahel (develop7)]

*peeked

sorry my english

[Olivier Bilodeau (plaxx)]

I was able to get prism + gears to work by modifying /usr/share/xul-ext-gears/components/stub.js.

I had already done this trick before ubuntu had packages for prism and gears. Here's where I heard about it: http://westacular.livejournal.com/43666.html

The thing is that when gears is triggered inside xulrunner, stub.js is used to tell gears under what version it is being run. However, under prism the version reported is not firefox's but prism's. A quick hack of firefoxVersion == "1.0" return "ff36"; is enough (see attached patch).

My suggestion for a cleaner fix would be that depending on what release you package against, you change the return value. In example: return ff35 for Karmic and ff36 for Lucid.

My test case is gmail offline under prism in lucid (firefox 3.6).

[Hilton Shumway (hillshum)]

Olivier's fix doesn't work for me. I'm on Lucid with FF3.6.

Once I apply the fix, Prism crashes immediately after being launched.

[Olivier Bilodeau (plaxx)]

This is another problem (well, to my knowledge) described here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/518422

Basically, what you need to do is to remove the compatibility.ini file before firefox starts (it'll get re-created). Mine was in: .prism/gmail/<profile>.default/ where <profile> is a unique obscure string for you.

I created a quick script to remove it each time I launch gmail prism:
---
#!/bin/bash

# workaround for lp:518422 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/518422)
/bin/rm ~/.prism/gmail/<censored>.default/compatibility.ini
/usr/bin/prism-google-mail
---
The remaining problem I've got with prism now is that outside links are opened in the prism window instead of the default browser (bug #224849).

[Hilton Shumway (hillshum)]

Okay. Bug #518422 is affecting me only when using prism-google-mail (and possibly other Prism apps, haven't tried) with xul-ext-gears. A Gears xpi I manually installed works there, however neither actually works. It behaves as if I haven't added the if (firefoxVersion == 1.0) code.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

For the people troubled with Prism starting with gears installed, there's bug 632779.