Source: firefox Version: 65.0-1 Severity: normal User: debian-sp...@lists.debian.org Usertags: sparc64
Hi! Since version 64.0-1, the Firefox package has a build dependency to compile Javascript sources during build instead of relying on pre-compiled Javascript files. While it's certainly a good idea not to ship precompiled Javascript files in the source, the change to build-depend on NodeJS made Firefox less portable. However, in Debian, we have a simple way to fix this problem: All Javascript code could just be compiled on arch:all such that the Firefox package has only a build dependency on nodejs for arch:all (binary-indep target in rules file). The compiled Javascript files could then go into an firefox-data_all.deb package while the architecture-dependent files would remain in the regular Firefox package. The advantage would space deduplication on the archive mirrors, build time deduplication on the buildds plus make the Firefox package buildable on all architectures again which were locked out after NodeJS was added as hard dependency. We would probably have to patch the Firefox sources as well since currently the build system always assumes that NodeJS has to be available on the build system. What I suggest would be adding switches to the build system to control which parts of Firefox are to be built: a) Firefox binaries + Javascript files (requires NodeJS) b) Javascript files only (requires NodeJS) c) Firefox binaries only (doesn't require NodeJS) Once that is in place, we would just have to add a dependency on the firefox-data package to the architecture-dependent Firefox package. Will open a bug upstream to suggest the changes to the build system. Adrian -- .''`. 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
