Re: [gentoo-user] FF increasingly being bundled up

[Mick]

On Saturday 03 Oct 2015 10:37:07 Marc Joliet wrote:
> On Saturday 03 October 2015 10:15:08 Mick wrote:
> >Hi All,
> >
> >I happened to notice that Firefox is having more and more USE flags for
> >using system-side rather than bundled in libraries:
> >
> >[ebuild     U  ] www-client/firefox-38.3.0::gentoo [38.2.1::gentoo]
> >USE="dbus gmp-autoupdate jemalloc3 jit minimal -bindist -custom-cflags
> >-custom- optimization -debug -egl -gstreamer -gstreamer-0 -hardened
> >(-neon) (-pgo) - pulseaudio (-selinux) -startup-notification
> >-system-cairo -system-icu -system- jpeg -system-libvpx -system-sqlite
> >{-test} -wifi"
> >
> >
> >However, such libraries are not enabled by default and FF will be
> >downloading 177,578 KiB of sources.  A couple of questions:
> >
> >- Will FF be downloading less if the system side USE flags are enabled?
> >- What are the benefits or disbenefits of enabling them?
>
> I don't know about the size of the downloads, but is that *really* a
> problem?

When you are on a metered ADSL connection, yes, it can be.


> As to the system-* flags:  I've been setting all of them except for system-
> sqlite since... they exist, I think.  I make the exception to system-sqlite
> because it likely has a negative performance impact on other packages that
> depend on sqlite.  However, it seems that at least system-cairo might be
> problematic in recent versions of Firefox, see
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558150.
>
> In general, I think it depends on how well upstream supports the flags and
> how quickly problems are noticed when using them, which might not be as
> quick as we like.
>
> HTH

Have you found that using local system flags causes rebuilds of FF more often?  
I seem to build or rebuild FF every couple of weeks, but I would not want to 
have to rebuild it more often.

-- 
Regards,
Mick