270026 - Build with --enable-plaintext-editor-only: Resulting Moz didn't work as expected?

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Klaus Kusche]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041113
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041113

Situation:
* I never use Mozilla's HTML Composer
* I use Mail and News, but write plain-text messages only, never HTML messages.

So I wanted to configure and build Mozilla without HTML editing, to speed up the
build process and reduce ressource consumption at runtime.

My first attempt was --disable-composer. That failed, because not only the
composer disappeared completely, but also mail and news - they were no longer
available on the "Window" menu (perhaps that configure option should be given a
more descriptive name?).

My next attempt was --enable-plaintext-editor-only. From the option's name, I
expected this to result in a mozilla which can only edit messages in plain text.
The build worked fine, and the resulting Mozilla contained Mail and News. 

However, there were two problems:
* The "Compose Message" window didn't allow to edit the message body at all: It
contained a large empty field where the message body usually is, but this field
couldn't be focussed or typed into.
* Any attempt to select the "View/Character encoding" menu entry in the message
composing window immediately crashed the whole mozilla with a sigsegv.

Is this expected behaviour? How do I build a mozilla without HTML editing
facilities?


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[timeless]

some web pages these days use contenteditable, that said, we know, and this is
not a supported configuration. we /might/ accept patches.

Comment 2

[Klaus Kusche]

1.) The "configure --help" of the officially released, stable build offers this
option, so, by definition, it is officially supported and valid. If you don't
want to support it, or know that it doesn't work, take it out of stable releases!

2.) "Contenteditable" is a HTML attribute not covered by any standards, invented
by M$, supported only by a minority of browsers, and never used by me (a browser
is for browsing, not for editing).
I'm not willing to donate my computer's ressources just because some rare sites
use such HTML nonsense, and you shouldn't encourage page designers to include
nonstandard HTML constructs in their pages by enabling such extensions by default.

What's about firefox and all the GTK+ Mozilla clones? They all come without
composer!

3.) Mozilla is by far to fat anyway, and for me, the HTML composer is the first
and most important thing to drop. And I believe the same is true for most
Unix/Linux Mozilla users: HTML Mail and News are considered as an offense among
Unixers, and Mozilla Composer is not the most prominent tool for creating web
pages in Linux.

In fact, the memory footprint and startup time of firefox plus a good mailer
like sylpheed plus a newsreader is less than Mozilla's!

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Mailnews doesn't use a plaintext editor, even for plaintext messages, last I
checked...  That's a mailnews bug, not an editor bug.

Comment 4

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.