Remove installable 'natives' feature that modifies String and RegExp prototypes

[retorquere]

I'm including xregexp in a firefox extension, and the changes to RegExp.prototype and String.prototype don't pass the impending extension signature validation. Is it possible to get an xregexp build that doesn't make these modifications to these prototypes?

[slevithan]

Hm, interesting. There's very little benefit to adding this option, since it would save almost no code, the "natives" option is already self-contained and not relied on by the rest of the code, and native overrides are already off by default. You'd essentially just need to comment out xregexp.js#L376-L380 or kill the setNatives function and its calls in install and uninstall. I'd recommend doing that for now, but will leave this open for more feedback.

[retorquere]

Fair enough. I'm not saying the addons validator is sane, but as it's going to be enforced on all Firefox extensions, I have to dance to its tune.

[slevithan]

Would be happy to see a pull request that showed how a custom build that worked around this problem would work and be set up.

I'm also considering removing support for XRegExp.install('natives') in the next major breaking change (XRegExp 4.0.0), which would resolve this since it would remove the lines in question for everyone.

[retorquere]

That's in essence what my pull request would do.

[wilmoore]

I'm also considering removing support for XRegExp.install('natives') in the next major breaking change (XRegExp 4.0.0), which would resolve this since it would remove the lines in question for everyone.

Before reading the above I was going to suggest something similar. Move XRegExp.install('natives') into a separate package that can optionally be installed by anyone who cared to.

[slevithan]

XRegExp.install('natives') was marked as deprecated in commit 57b3172.

[retorquere]

Super. Any timeline on a release which would contain this change?

[slevithan]

This will be included in v4.0.0. Sorry, no timeline at the moment.

There's no required delay before releasing v4.0.0, but I would like to bundle the drop of support for XRegExp.install('natives') with at least one other planned breaking change: #108 (drop all support for pre-ES5 browsers). These changes might take a while since I'm not able to dedicate much time to the project at the moment.

[slevithan]

After making this change, will also want to update tests/helpers/h.js to no longer try to uninstall 'natives'.

[slevithan]

@retorquere this is finally completed and included in v4.0.0, thanks to @josephfrazier.