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

[James Carlson]

On 03/27/15 07:50, Dmitry Kozhinov wrote:
> 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)?

I don't view it as an either-or proposition at all.

Having developer (or perhaps better stated as "maintainer" or
"distributor") provided binaries is great.  You're right that it's a
time saver for ordinary users.

But having reliably buildable sources is also crucial.  Without that,
it's no longer really open source.  I realize that the build process for
some things may be complex and perhaps poorly documented, but what good
is source code that I can theoretically "see" but that I cannot build on
my own if that is what I wish to do?

If Open Indiana isn't about open source, what's it about?

-- 
James Carlson         42.703N 71.076W         <carlsonj at workingcode.com>