[OpenIndiana-discuss] Why I will never try to build Firefox from source code

[Jonathan Adams]

While personally I agree with someone else compiling Firefox and "it just
working" (FYI I use the Firefox pkg from the Mozilla ftp site), I can see
that there is a use of knowing how to compile and maintain packages.

As it happens, there is a use of compiling it yourself if you are in the
position of creating binary extensions, or plugins for firefox, and you
need to have access to the objects and includes from the source of the
firefox you are compiling against.  I however have not done this in years,
not since the last "enigmail" released for Solaris.

I do compile a large number of programs and libraries for our older Solaris
10 systems, OpenLDAP, Squid, Samba, ClamAV, etc. which means also compiling
the supporting libraries, BerkleyDB, OpenSSL, etc. and I guess on one level
it is good to keep practicing with compiling this stuff to get to the point
where you can keep doing it, or even progress to the point where you can
maintain the package for a platform, and give back to the community.

There are also times when the compile options on the packages are lacking,
but as in OpenLDAP on OI, I just asked the maintainers to add those compile
options, and they quickly re-released the package, resulting in me not
having to do it myself, and it being maintained "in tree" for the future.

I don't give anywhere near enough back to the community, and I'm not in a
position to do so at the moment, and I doubt I will have the time or energy
to increase my involvement in the future, but that doesn't mean that I
don't appreciate the effort of everyone involved.

As for Martin's work, I have not downloaded or used any of his products
because I am not in a position to support him financially, and he has
stated that he doesn't like people taking his work for nothing.  I would
greatly appreciate it if he could give us more than hints about the issues
with flash and the Gnome interface, and I will continue to publicise his
work to anyone that I feel might be in a position to use his work, or pay
for his services, but I know he has reasons for not giving us these changes
after the amount of time he spent working on them.

Hopefully some of this was readable, rather than rambling :)

Jon


On 27 March 2015 at 11:50, Dmitry Kozhinov <dima at desktopfay.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The discussion here is lately focused on "how do I build package A" and
> "how do I build package B". Firefox is a good example. I will say "Firefox"
> in this message, but this may be applied to other packages as well.
>
> Isn't it supposed that Firefox should be built by Firefox *developers*,
> not *users* (note that we are on oi-discuss list, not oi-dev)? And there
> are ready-to-use binaries, why not use them? Building such things by users
> is a duplicate and a waste of effort. Why not spend your precious time to
> do something productive, something new (be that related to OI or not)?
>
> All the best,
> Dmitry.
>
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