Folks: I spent some time this weekend figuring out the effort involved in porting Songbird to Solaris. Songbird is a major (IMO) application that depends upon XulRunner, and since I've got XULRunner to build on Solaris, I've decided to start to help port other XULRunner based apps to Solaris.
I missed out on time because the songbird svn server suddenly went down midway during my svn checkout. Observations so far: - Check out the Mozilla source tree, and then create a backup of this. The Songbird installer patched the Mozilla source tree, so you may want to preserve the pristine sources. - Quite few external dependencies do not have Solaris versions yet. This list includes the likes of mp4 (which depends on libpthread - is there a Solaris version and is this API compatible with what mp4 depends on ?), libogg (I've only seen posts about problems with compiling libogg on Solaris 8 and on Solaris 9. And that's with the gcc. - The biggest problem may well be the use of the gcc for these vendor dependencies. I've myself not been able to build Firefox/XULRunner on Solaris 10 and above using the gcc. I use Sun Studio 11 instead. I've seen vtable issues when mixing libraries linked with two different tool chains. i.e., libA (gcc built)depends on libB (sunstudio built). I've put together the above based on some quick browsing in the last 30 minutes after checking out the Songibrd sources and the vendor-dependencies. Looks like building Songbird itself on Solaris would be one of the last steps to address. -- Sriram
