#13969: Review the thunderbird build
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Reporter: ken@… | Owner: blfs-book
Type: enhancement | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: 10.1
Component: BOOK | Version: SVN
Severity: normal | Keywords:
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Our thunderbird build is horrendously large and slow. This can be
addressed.
At [http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-
dev/2020-August/03A7570.html] I set out my findings from building on one
machine.
1. The main cause of the excessive space and time is that the --disable-
debug switch we are using still leaves the debug symbols.
2. Adding --enable-linker=gold marginally reduces the size of the install,
but more importantly it saves more time in the build.
3. It is unclear exactly what the --disable-debug switch does (the size of
the build with it and without it is almost identical), but it appears it
should be retained because brief tests without it show the build takes
longer.
All three of those are used by gentoo.
4. Adding CC=gcc CXX=g++ with all of those switches creates a marginally
bigger build but seems to build much faster. I am suspicious that this
might be normal variation, perhaps caused by random build order in rust.
Older versions of firefox used to suffer from that, the current 78.2.0
seems to be consisent to the nearest SBU. Note that although in the past I
rejected using gold for firefox because the result with gcc was larger and
slower to build, that is not the case with thunderbird.
5. I have been informed that current thunderbird-78 has built-in support
for openpgp, using shipped librnp. The information was ambiguously worded
but I think this support is built by default and could be disabled with
--disable-openpgp although I question why one would do that. Certainly
comm/third_party/rnp/librnp.so is built. At the moment that cannot be
linked against system bz2, jsonc or botan (whatever that is) - there is a
bug for allowing system versions of those to be used, but probably not in
the 78 series.
If we make the build less cumbersome we could add this to the Errata for
10.0 and it might make thunderbird buildable on smaller machines.
--
Ticket URL: <http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/ticket/13969>
BLFS Trac <http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs>
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