Having successfully built a pyxpcom xulrunner, I am in doubt whether it’s the way to proceed.

• it’s heavy – like 50mb!
• writing for it is not like writing a web app, though it has similarities.

Basically I think it won’t help us much with the “degraded” scenario – where someone has “only” a browser to interact with the system – and that’s kind of a non-starter.

So I started to think about what we *really* need on the local system.

Basically the only issue with being just a web app is that we need access to the local version control install. For the most part, this could be addressed by having “whatever we install locally” be itself a server. That seems like a good strategy, because then the remote/local difference is pretty arbitrary.

The user experience issue would be how we interact with external editors.  The only way around the security restrictions I see is for the local server to actually do the open-file-in-editor, and the web app just issues said instruction to the local app.

There are a bunch of value-adds to this – the “server” could be any of these “vcs in a bottle” systems that is nearby, while the “client” could be your phone or whatever.

So I think this is the approach we’ll take.

I’m now investigating mercurial instead of git (windows/mac installers are available) because it plays nicer with the use-cases I’m interested in supporting and it has more of an “API” – plus it’s in python so I can grok it.