[Nix-dev] Re: firefox-3.0.1-with-plugins fails to build

[Eelco Dolstra]

Ludovic Courtès wrote:

>>> I'm 90% sure the attached patch fixes the problem (it just mimics what's
>>> done for GNU IceCat).  Can you confirm this?
>> This patch should work but it does double the size of the Firefox installation
>> (because it includes a separate xulrunner build).  As far as I can tell, the
>> only reason mplayerplug-in and friends fail to build is because Firefox 3
>> forgets to install some XUL/XPCOM-related stuff (which it does build).  Firefox
>> 2 did install them.  Maybe we can manually install the missing files in the
>> postInstall hook.
> 
> Hmm, are you sure it builds everything that's needed?
> 
> Surely, a large part of the build is duplicated between both, but I was
> under the impression that only one "application" (i.e., `browser' or
> `xulrunner') could be built at a time (with `--enable-application' at
> configure-time).

I've finally fixed it :-)  Firefox 3 is now built on top of the Xulrunner
package, and it seems to run fine.  This has the advantages that it makes the
Firefox build very quickly (actually unpacking the sources takes the most time)
and it makes the Firefox installation much smaller.  We can do the same for
Thunderbird 3 once it's released.

I did the same for IceCat (i.e. running IceCat on top of Mozilla's xulrunner),
but I haven't committed this yet.  It might be that IceCat contains some changes
to the libxul code, which we would then miss out on.  Also, some of the
extensions that IceCat includes (like python/xpcom) don't build properly because
they refer to a non-existant libxpcom_core, so they're disabled.  Other than
that, it seems to run fine.

The patch is attached.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: icecat-xulrunner.patch
Url: http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20081030/8927b80b/attachment.pl