On Sunday 18 January 2009 18:44:40 Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2009-01-18, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sunday 18 January 2009 18:02:10 Grant Edwards wrote: > >> I just build firefox and noticed the following warning in the > >> ebuild output, and I'm a bit baffled by the grammar: > >> > >> All the packages built against mozilla-firefox won't > >> compile, if after installing firefox 3.0 you get some > >> blockers, please add 'xulrunner' to your USE-flags. > >> > >> Does anybody have idea what the above sentence is trying to say? > > > > It's saying that if you use firefox -3*, then you should > > remove "firefox" from your USE and add "xulrunner" instead. > > This way, nothing in the tree will try to pull in firefox-2* > > (which obviously conflicts with firefox-3*). > > Wow. I'm not doubting that what you say is true, but how > anybody was supposed to get that from the emerge message is > beyond me. > > > There have been 4 earlier threads on this very topic in the > > last fortnight. For more details, please check the recent > > archives (rehashing the same thing over and over is getting > > really tedious) > > Sort of makes you wonder if the message is a bit too cryptic, > eh?
If I read that message out loud, it sounds suspiciously like a babelfish translation from Japanese to English. Whatever it is, the author of the message is certainly not a native English speaker. But the intent is easy to see if you already know how it works. Briefly: The gecko rendering engine was always part of firefox through versions 1 and 2. This is plain silly as such a thing should really be an independent block of code that stands alone and everything else can use without requiring that all of firefox be present. This has now been fixed, the engine is now in a package called xulrunner which firefox builds against. Other apps also need xulrunner, but if you keep "USE=firefox" intact those apps will pull in all of firefox-2 just to get gecko. If you have firefox-3 installed, you have an instant blocker. With "USE=xulrunner" they will build against xulrunner and firefox can be whatever you feel like installing. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
