Hi! I was browsing the debian-devel mailing list archives some weeks ago and ran into this thread [1] where the removal of the firefox-esr package on armel was discussed because newer Firefox versions have a build-dependency on nodejs which isn't available on armel.
This could actually be fixed by patching the Debian source package such that the Javascript code is compiled in the binary-indep target of debian/rules so that the compiled Javascript files are put into the arch:all package and the Firefox packages firefox and firefox-esr can be built on armel, powerpc and sparc64 again. I know from a contact at Oracle that they are doing this to be able to build Firefox on Solaris/SPARC, they just keep the Javascript files in the repository out of which they are building the Firefox package for SPARC [2]. If we manage to split out the Javascript files into an arch:all package, we would be able to build Firefox on armel, powerpc, riscv64 and sparc64 as all these targets have full Rust support but don't support NodeJS. In the future, this will affect MIPS as well [3]. I think even ppc64 support is going to be removed from NodeJS in the near future. I have already opened a bug report for that against src:firefox [4]. Would anyone be interested to work with me on this issue? PS: Please keep me CC'ed, I'm not on the list. Thanks, Adrian > [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/10/msg00391.html > [2] > https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland/commit/05a1b957d036297a70a1f42a453f94f8cb789324 > [3] https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/26179 > [4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=920902 -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
