Akkana says --disable-editor is bogus right now, it effectively turns off the HTML text areas so ? what's the point of that. We should remove this option and re-add it later if someone wants to do work to make this option useful.

Adding jim, who provoked me into filing this bug :-)

Ok, I must give the obligatory "You shouldn't have to build the entire editor component to use text fields" whine. Currently, editor Makefile.in looks like this: DIRS = public idl ifdef MOZ_EDITOR DIRS += base ui endif DIRS += txmgr txtsvc I'm going to try moving base out of the MOZ_EDITOR ifdef to see if that helps. If it doesn't, then I'll remove the option from configure.

So --disable-editor would merely avoid copying the UI files (.xul and .js) to dist/bin? That doesn't seem worth having a build flag for ... a couple of seconds in build time and a few symlinks, and it will break XUL keybindings (since the JS won't be there) so you'll only get whatever keybindings are hardcoded in (currently cut/copy/paste/select all/undo/redo, but I may add some basic emacs bindings to that eventually). If we could build without the txmgr and txtsvc directories, it might make a slight difference in build time. But we've been told that Undo/Redo is required for text fields, so we haven't made any effort to work without the txmgr. Txtsvc might conceivably be splitoffable, but again, probably isn't worth having a build flag just for that. I'm sympathetic to your whine, really; it's just that the parts of editor that aren't currently required for text fields (including the possibility of type=text/html) are so small that they aren't worth breaking off. A real --disable-editor should use platform widgets for text fields and text areas, but I suspect it would be a lot of work to make this happen (re-enabling the old platform widget code only for text widgets), especially if you wanted mail/news to work.

thanks akkana. I don't think people are gonna use this option, it's misleading, you end up with a broken browser, I vote for delete.

--disable-editor and MOZ_EDITOR have now joined the ranks of urban mozilla folklore.