[oi-dev] Would OI be interested in Pale Moon?

Jeremy Andrews athenian200 at outlook.com
Wed Dec 11 06:38:56 UTC 2019


I ported UXP to illumos and Solaris recently, and I got them to take the 
code upstream. I'm pretty anxious about the process now honestly, and 
really want everything to work out. There are a few things I'm worried 
about, though.

1. I'm not very familiar with how packages are actually packaged for OI, 
and the p5m file for Firefox in particular is... so complicated that 
I've been holding off creating a Pale Moon system package for OI until 
now, when they're pushing me to try. I was hoping that the subject 
wouldn't come up and they'd just want to distribute a binary .tar.xz 
file like they do for other operating systems (that kind of package is 
very easy to create with a single command). I'm so mixed up because the 
.p5m file for Firefox 52 looks so different from the one for Firefox 60, 
and includes all these header files, is for 32-bit, etc. And I'm trying 
to figure out which differences are due to a change in package design, 
and which are due to actual differences in Firefox.

2. Pale Moon has some unusual requirements. For one thing, it can't use 
the system NSS because Mozilla has changed the API somewhat since they 
forked. In general, they're leery of using system libraries over the 
ones in their own tree because sometimes those libraries have to be 
modified in specific ways for the browser. On top of that, they seem to 
have a problem with distributing the langpacks with the browser. They 
have a site where you can download a langpack of your choice, but you 
can't ship it with the browser for some reason.

I'm kind of afraid now that I've done all this for nothing. I'm worried 
that their packaging requirements and our packaging requirements may not 
line up, and I'll wind up only being able to distribute a tarball on my 
own web space that no one will ever download. It's a very good browser, 
and the people behind it are actually decent people, but... I'm 
overwhelmed with the sense that I've gotten in over my head.





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