Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@g.o>
To: Gentoo Dev <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Mozilla Team meeting decisions
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:03:55
Message-Id: 8b4c83ad1002211301t12468258tac691cc824952d25@mail.gmail.com
1 On Feb 21st, Sunday, the Gentoo Mozilla Team had an informal meeting
2 to discuss some of the recent changes which have a large-ish impact on
3 users. Below is a list of them and the decisions that were taken.
4 After the list is a description of each decision.
5
6 -> SQLite with Firefox: Firefox will use the bundled sqlite by
7 default. Users can select the system-wide sqlite by setting
8 USE=system-sqlite.
9
10 -> Ebuilds for Extensions in-tree: The Gentoo Mozilla team will not
11 ship ebuilds for extensions such as noscript and weave anymore. We
12 will only have ebuilds for extensions which are linux-specific and
13 compiled; such as enigmail.
14
15 -> Firefox and Thunderbird Alphas and Betas: In addition to the
16 overlay, we are going to start placing alphas and betas of Firefox and
17 Thunderbird in the tree with a package.mask and a big fat ewarn during
18 installation. Adventurous users are encouraged try them out but report
19 bugs only in the Gentoo bugzilla. Do not go to upstream unless we ask
20 you.
21
22 NOTE: These ebuilds will not have language packs since upstream does
23 not release packs for these.
24
25 -> NSS/NSPR Changes: This involves various cleanups to the ebuild, and
26 moving of the libraries from ${libdir}/{nss/nspr} to ${libdir} and
27 removal of the /etc/env.d/08{nss,nspr} LDPATH entries alongwith
28 corresponding changes in firefox-bin and thunderbird-bin launchers.
29 These changes should be completely transparent to the user.
30
31 -> Revival of #gentoo-mozilla @ FreeNode: The mozilla team has
32 expanded in recent times, and with that we have decided to revive the
33 ages-old #gentoo-mozilla irc channel. Users are welcome to idle,
34 discuss, and ask for help on that channel. Come on over!
35
36 =========================
37 Why we made these decisions:
38 =========================
39
40 NOTE: These are very link-heavy, so you might want to view them in
41 html at: http://bheekly.blogspot.com/2010/02/gentoo-mozilla-team-meeting-decisions.html
42
43 ====
44 SQLite with Firefox: We've done flip-flops on using the
45 system-installed sqlite for for XULRunner and Firefox. Initially, we
46 used the internal one, but folks reported bugs[1][2][3] about that (we
47 prefer not to use bundled libraries), so we switched to the system
48 sqlite.
49
50 Then with the next version of Firefox, people started reporting major
51 bugs[4][5] with using the system sqlite and we temporarily disabled
52 it. Once the problems were resolved, we added USE=+sqlite to use the
53 system-installed sqlite by default.
54
55 Recently, another issue cropped up: upstream mozilla was getting bug
56 reports that the sqlite db was insecure, and trivial tools like grep
57 could be used to get (private) deleted information from it. They
58 traced that to distros using the system sqlite which didn't have
59 support for SQLITE_SECURE_DELETE. They then made that a mandatory
60 configure check with 3.6 (and we added a dep on the system sqlite for
61 it). Soon, we started getting bug reports[6] from people who did not
62 want that enabled system-wide (since it zeroes out the data when
63 deleting it, which has a performance penalty). Upstream made it clear
64 that they would not make the check optional[7].
65
66 In the end, we decided to make firefox use the internal sqlite by
67 default, and allow the user to select the system installed sqlite via
68 USE=sytem-sqlite if they are ok with secure-delete being on
69 system-wide.
70
71 ====
72 Ebuilds for Extensions in-tree: We found that a number of extensions
73 were being released at a very swift rate which meant two things:
74
75 1. Bumping ebuilds was very tedious, which led to them becoming
76 stale very quickly[8][9]
77 2. Judging whether an ebuild can go stable was not possible, and
78 most often the extension developers just want the users to use the
79 latest release.
80
81 This offset the benefit of users being able to install extensions
82 system-wide and have it managed by portage. Users can still manually
83 install and manage system-wide extensions if they so wish. They are
84 also free to copy the old ebuilds to their local overlays and use them
85 if they wish.
86
87 ====
88 Firefox and Thunderbird Alphas and Betas: Mozilla Upstream has been
89 complaining that their betas and release candidates don't get much
90 testing on Linux since all the distros ship only the final releases.
91 This means that bugs are caught very late, and aren't fixed till the
92 next major version. To help with this, we've decided to revise our
93 release strategy and give a bit more visibility to our alphas and
94 betas (which are generally kept in the overlay[10]) by pushing them to
95 the tree under package.mask, and with large ewarns all over the place.
96 Users are strongly advised NOT to report bugs with these directly to
97 upstream. Please use the Gentoo Bugzilla.
98
99 ====
100 NSS/NSPR Changes: the libraries for nss and nspr were installed in a
101 prefix due to collisions with other packages (libssl.a for instance).
102 Recently, Google decided to use portage for cross-compiling and
103 managing ChromeOS. This combined with some bugs reported[11][12] with
104 NSS/NSPR led to some investigation, and a voluntary review[13][14] of
105 the ebuilds by the nice folks at Google.
106
107 This led to a number of changes which included disabling static
108 libraries for NSS and NSPR, and moving the rest to ${libdir}. Further
109 details on the changes and their "why" are listed on the review bugs
110 linked above.
111
112 ====
113 1. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228637
114 2. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258462
115 3. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303028
116 4. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=281695
117 5. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283083
118 6. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304913
119 7. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546162
120 8. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297214
121 9. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295252
122 10. http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/mozilla.git
123 11. http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=32081
124 12. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302807
125 13. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545037
126 14. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545036
127
128 --
129 ~Nirbheek Chauhan
130
131 Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team

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