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

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2015 at 9:41 AM, Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> Thank you all for your replies.  I've enabled the system-* flags and firefox
> built in the same time give or take a few seconds.  I can't see a difference
> yet, although it feels faster - clear psychological advantage!  ;-)
>

The same tarball is used either way.  We'd need to rip it apart and
distribute modified tarballs ourselves if we wanted to change that,
and this generally isn't how we do things.  In the case of firefox it
might even have legal issues due to how they treat their trademarks,
but I'd have to look into that.

I wouldn't expect using system sqllite to have any negative impact on
other system packages using sqllite.  It might or might not affect
firefox performance if its sqllite build options are different from
the system library.  I believe some sqllite behavior settings are only
configurable at build time.

Besides saving build time, using system libraries would save RAM and
load time as well, since firefox would share those libraries with
other programs vs loading private copies of them.  There is also the
security matter, which is normally a very important reason to use
system libraries, but firefox is probably at least as rigorous about
keeping their bundled libraries updated as Gentoo is, so that could go
either way.

Obviously you're going to have less upstream support in general for
system libraries, but most distros are going to use them anyway.

I'm not quite sure why more of them aren't used by default on Gentoo.
Chromium tries to use as many system libs as they can, with more
experimental ones being defaulted to bundled, and ones that they
haven't managed to unbundle may not be optional.  Google loves to
patch the stuff they distribute, so you can't just switch to system
libs in all cases without fixing all the APIs.

-- 
Rich