Re: Firefox 52's end of life, packaging Icecat 60

["Clément Lassieur" <clement@lassieur.org>]

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> writes:

> Hi Clément,

[...]

> Thanks for looking into this, and for raising the issue.  If you, or
> someone else, would like to take the lead on this, I would be grateful.
>
> For now, I would suggest trying to package upstream Firefox ESR 60.
> Although we cannot add Firefox itself to Guix, IceCat 60 will be almost
> identical to Firefox ESR 60, so we should be able to simply drop it in
> when it becomes available.
>
> To simplify things initially, you could comment out some or all of the
> patches, snippet code, configure flags, and phases which try to avoid
> bundled libraries and to use system libraries instead.  However, I would
> not assume that commenting *all* of that out will help.  It's possible
> that some of the bundled libraries won't work as-is on Guix because of
> our unusual filesystem layout, whereas our corresponding system
> libraries have already been patched to address those issues.
> Alternatively, any needed patches and/or substitutions from our system
> libraries could be applied to the corresponding bundled libraries.
>
> The 'link-libxul-with-libraries' phase could also be commented out
> temporarily, and instead you could manually set LD_LIBRARY_PATH as
> needed before launching Firefox, so that it can find the shared
> libraries it needs.
>
> Any of these temporary solutions would be fine for now.  If you run into
> difficulties, I would be glad to take a look.
>
> If you can get Firefox ESR 60 working with the above simplifications,
> then I would be glad to work on avoiding the bundled libraries, adapting
> the 'link-libxul-with-libraries' phase, and swapping in IceCat 60.
>
> What do you think?

Thank you for your reply, it's very helpful.  I'm still busy working on
Cuirass and then I'll need to take some vacations.  I'll try to have a
look though, if I find some time.

Note that I have a powerful machine (it builds Firefox 52 in 8 minutes),
and I could temporarily give ssh access to someone working on
Firefox/Icecat if it helps.

Clément