On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 11:20:40PM +0100, Mick wrote > I looked at how long some packages are taking these days. I noticed that > firefox and chromium take a lot longer to emerge than was the case 3-4 years > ago. For example:
[...deletia...] > I am wondering if something in my configuration is causing this, > rather than my laptop getting older for the continuously evolving > and perhaps more demanding (in terms of resources to compile) > software code. Have you noticed something similar? The firefox-24.5.0esr.source.tar.bz2 tarball is 119,830,718 bytes!!! I'm an old fart who remembers back in the days of DOS when that was the entire hard drive. If you think firefox is insane, chromium is stark raving berserk. It's bad enough that the current chromium tarball is 185,717 KB (i.e. approx 190,174,208 bytes). What's worse, to paraphrase the old emacs joke, is that chromium is a mediocre operating system that lacks a lightweight web browser. Remember when AOL tried to turn Netscape into a vitual OS on top of Windows/linux/etc? Google seems to be doing the same with chrome. I already have firefox and opera and uzbl and dillo on my system. Emerging chromium would pull in 25 additional packages. "Chromium-OS" requires opus and speex and libsndfile and speech-dispatcher and one of systemd/udev or eudev!!! It won't build on my mdev-based system. I remember the "good-old-days", manually building phoenix betas from source, because it really was a lightweight web-browser. Those days are now a distant memory. Things are looking grim on the lightweight web browser front for linux. Using the car analogy, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox has degenerated from a lightweight sub-compact to an oversized gas-guzzling SUV. Ditto for Chromium. UZBL and Midori are different shells on top of webkit-gtk. Webkit-gtk1 has been deprecated in favour of webkit-gtk2, which pulls in the latest gtk3, i.e. half of GNOME. And for good measure, webkit-gtk2 also pulls in ruby!!! WTF??? Opera appears to be no longer developed for posix (linux/bsd/etc). I.e. linux is at version 12.16 while Windows is at 22.0! Given the way browsers have bloated recently, that may be good thing. Security patches still seem to be coming. But don't expect the latest/greatest web-pages to work. The Dillo project is still alive and being developed, but it doesn't yet support Javascript, let alone plugins. It'll be a while before it's usable on most of today's web. -- Walter Dnes <[email protected]> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
