Re: Preconfiguration of Firefox

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2006, Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote:

> If this can help, it's easy to add search engines to Firefox (or Mozilla).
>
> For example, on Firefox.
> The directory /usr/lib/firefox/searchplugins contains all the search plugins 
> that will appear oh the search field. If we want to install, for example, a 
> search engine to find things on Pubmed, we can get an already implemented 
> search engine for Pubmed at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/plugins/pubmed.src (I 
> didn't saw any license on this file,

Would anybody volunteer to do some research about the license?

> but if it's not allowed to include it on 
> Debian (if we are going to include), we can create a new .scr file as it's 
> not difficult). Also, we need a picture to be displayed on the search box 
> (like Google has a "G"). On our example, it's 
> http://mycroft.mozdev.org/plugins/pubmed.png

IMHO we also would net a license here.  From its location at mozdev.org
I'm optimistic that it is free, but we should verify this.

> Perfect. With both files in hand, we just need to install them on 
> /usr/lib/firefox/searchplugins
> When Firefox is restarted, we get a new option to choose: NCBI PubMed.

Sounds quite easy.

> On Mozilla, we use the same files, but we install them on 
> /usr/lib/mozilla/searchplugins/

We should verify who other searchplugins solve this.  I guess a simple
symlink might do here.

> If we are going to include some personalized search engines on Firefox, we 
> just need to get what we need (or create if there is no ready solution) and 
> install on the directories that I said. Simple, right? :-)

Yes. :)

> But there is a problem (that I don't know if it's really a problem).
> If we install the files on /usr/lib/firefox/searchplugins, the search engines 
> will be available to all users on the system, even those that are not on the 
> "med" group.

No.  This is not really a problem.  I was missleaded by my assumption
that these settings are local users settings.  I can't see any harm
if non-med users will see some extra search engines.

> I don't know how we can limit the search engines to be listed only on users 
> from the group med... :-/

I see no reason to put much effort into this.

> I think that there is no problem in installing the search engine to all 
> users, since it will be included on a CDD, right?

Exactly.

> A package that installs search engines related with our area would be nice! 
> :-D

I only wonder if installing some small files are worth of creating an
extra package.  I wonder if we could add these files to a reasonable
package.  Biofox comes into mind - but I'm not sure whether it makes
really sense.  If we find no reasonable package we could even put it
as extra workload to a reasonable (whatever "reasonable" means here)
med-* package.

> If there is something that I can help on this, you can count with me.

Thanks for your effort, Nelson.

Kind regards

            Andreas.

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