In the thread 'firefox and libvpx' Bruce noted that firefox-65.0 failed to build with libvpx-1.8.0. I had earlier been looking at current 66.0beta (b6) [ albeit without managing to build it ] and there the test is similarly for >= 1.7.0. So I've removed that recommended dependency and commented the item in mozconfig with an explanation.
But this makes me wonder if we should drop most of the system libs from firefox ? When I started, systms were small and using the system libraries seemed a good idea. There were also reports of problems if firefox used its own sqlite3 and the system had a different version. Since then, we have improved our handling of ca-certificates, so continuing to use (latest) system nss and nspr seems like a good idea - I think that if hte shipped versions are used, only the upstream certificates available when the release was cut will be used - so no changes and no local certs. But beyond that, I start to think that times have moved on: Chromium took a lead in forking local copies of everything, and to an extent firefox has fallen into a similar approach (local copies, not always forked, but not necessarily using pkgconfig to pull the correct headers). I guess things started to go downhill when I persuaded the other editors that we should use the apng patches for libpng, in the mistaken belief that other distros would do the same. That was in the days when '/' could be small, and firefox could be compiled in small amounts of RAM. Nowadays, doing this in systems smaller than 20GB, or with less than 8GB of RAM, is unpleasant. In more recent times we have lost the ability to use system cairo (first it failed to build, then the option was removed). So, I personally think that we should perhaps drop (from firefox) the following system libraries: icu, libpng, libvpx and I am inclined to drop the system versions of: libevent, libffi, libwebp, libpixman. Also, of course, drop the patch for system graphite2 and harfbuzz. I guess that we can probably continue to use system bz2, jpeg, sqlite, zlib without any problems. Dropping the apng patch would also mean dropping system libpng from seamonkey and thunderbird. Thoughts ? Note that I have not measured the changed time/space with firefox dropping system libvpx, nor with dropping those I mentioned above. But since its 'mach' build system gives variables times on subsequent runs, and also slightly different space usage (also noted in thunderbird when I looked at it after Douglas had problems), I suspect that although the space and SBUs might increase a little, it will not be a big deal. ĸen -- The beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the conclusion that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greates. -- du Garbandier -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
