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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Eelco Dolstra <e.dolstra at tudelft.nl>
writes:

> 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.

Great!

> 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.

Nice, thanks!

A few questions/remarks:

> ===================================================================
> --- pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix	(revision 13165)
> +++ pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix	(working copy)
> @@ -7304,21 +7304,11 @@
>      inherit fetchurl stdenv lzma pkgconfig perl zip libjpeg libpng zlib cairo
>        python dbus dbus_glib freetype fontconfig bzip2 xlibs;
>      inherit (gnome) libIDL libgnomeui gnomevfs gtk pango;
> +    xulrunner = xulrunner3;
>    });

Why not use `icecatXulrunner3' here instead of Mozilla's version?  Looks
to me that it would be more reliable, especially if IceCat contains
changes to libxul, as you noted.

> -  patches = [ ./skip-gre-registration.patch ];
> +  #patches = [ ./skip-gre-registration.patch ];

Is that necessary?

> +    # From the original .mozconfig (which we delete below because it interferes with our settings):
> +    "--with-user-appdir=.gnuzilla"
> +    "--with-distribution-id=org.gnu.gnuzilla"

Why do we need these?

> +    "--with-branding=browser/branding/unofficial"

This one shouldn't be needed with IceCat, I suppose.

> -    if [ -f "$out/lib/$libDir/xpidl" ]
> -    then
> -        # XulRunner's IDL compiler.
> -        echo "linking \`xpidl'..."
> -        ln -s "$out/lib/$libDir/xpidl" "$out/bin"
> -    fi

MPlayer-Plugin expects `xpidl' in its PATH so I think this shouldn't be
removed.

I should have factorized Firefox and IceCat earlier...

Thanks!

Ludo'.