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Comment by hoistbypetard | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I opened the Linux tarball and had a look around... what a blast from the past. It looks like this is built on XULRunner and friends. I had the impression that platform had slipped into such disrepair that it was no longer practical to ship products based on it.

It looks tremendously useful, though. If it had been around when I was in school, I suspect I'd have found it indispensable.

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> had the impression that [XULRunner] had slipped into such disrepair that it was no longer practical to ship products based on it

It's not! Zotero has a novel build system where instead of using XULRunner, which is no longer available, the build scripts download a release version of Firefox and then replace the browser-specific modules and other assets with Zotero's bundle.

I almost thought you were being serious. I find it hard to detect sarcasm on HN.

It's not sarcasm[1][2].

And as bad as it sounds, it's not worse than most other build systems[3][4] (including Firefox's own build system[5], or anything based on Electron[6]).

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25458080>

2. <https://github.com/zotero/zotero-standalone-build/blob/5.0.9...>

3. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29125925>

4. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495646>

5. <https://merveilles.town/@neauoire/104791486912313598>

6. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25905152>

…holy cow. I also thought you were joking. When I read the headline and that Z6 is the "biggest upgrade in Zotero's history," I was absolutely looking forward to it ditching XULRunner and friends.

This… this is not what I had in mind.

This isn't a very nice comment. It reads like the equivalent of someone trying to use high school bully tactics to make someone else feel bad by convincing them that if they don't stop being weird then no one will like them. No actual criticism—just straight up "look at the weirdo"-tier sniping.

I mean, that is weird. I don't think he was trying to bully anyone. It's just a super awkward way to build software.

I certainly wasn't intending to bully anyone, yeah. I understand why they're doing it that way, it's just unexpected.

Looks like you failed to absorb the point of the previous comment: No actual criticism—just straight up "look at the weirdo". Instead of addressing that, you just embraced it:

> I mean, that is weird

So? The purpose of my comment wasn't to dispute that it was weird. Want to stipulate that it's weird? Fine, granted. Pointing out that something is weird, however, is not a sufficient substitute for substance.

I think we all thought that the things that make it weird and inadvisable are self-evident.

Trying to appeal to the argument that everyone _knows_ you're a weirdo—as, once again, a substitute for articulating any sort of actual criticism—is for losers.

You don't want everyone to think you're a loser, do you?

GFY

my impression too. the documentation is no longer on MDN...

still, Zotero team has built amazing software on top of it. dstillman and team do awesome work.

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