[CentOS] A bit more on the Firefox 3.5.issue

Mike A. Harris mharris at mharris.ca
Wed Aug 12 06:10:44 UTC 2009


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John Thomas wrote:
> Ron Blizzard wrote:
>> Firefox 3.5 and *some* CentOS 5.3 computers (an Xorg graphics card
>> incompatibility issue?) -- it goes beyond the RPM package released by
>>
> For the record, I have been using Michael Harris' 3.5 Firefox without 
> any issues at all and with some speed benefits.  I hope Mr. Harris is 
> not discouraged by the bug reports and will, at his convenience, roll up 
> the latest and greatest version.

Heh, no, I'm not discouraged by that, as it is not a firefox bug.  ;o)

I have the latest xulrunner-1.9.1.2 and firefox-3.5.2 SRPMs in my repo,
however for the time being at least I am no longer providing binary rpm
packages.

The Mozilla trademark guidelines used to have a clause in them that
permitted unmodified rebuilds of the firefox source which only differ in
build options or similar, but that clause expired in April 2009 as I
found out recently.  After talking with a few knowledgeable people, it
seems that I need to either contact the right people at mozilla.org to
show them my builds and ask for permission to use the firefox trademarks
on rebuilt binaries, or I need to remove the trademarks and rename the
package to something else (similar to how Debian renamed it to iceweasel).

For the time being at least, either approach is way more effort than I
really want to put into firefox right now, so I am just uploading my
SRPMs for people to rebuild for themselves, which I believe is ok to do
as I'm not modifying the firefox sources at all, but rather just
providing src.rpms that contain a modified spec file and alternative
.mozconfig for building with EL5.

People who would like to rebuild my src.rpms, can download them directly
from my EL5 repo, or can install the repo config files and use
yumdownloader to get the xulrunner and firefox src.rpm packages.  Then
just rebuild them with rpmbuild or mock.  I've just sync'd the latest
src.rpm of xulrunner and firefox tonight:

http://mharris.ca/pub/el/5/SRPMS/xulrunner-1.9.1.2-0.mh.1.src.rpm
http://mharris.ca/pub/el/5/SRPMS/firefox-3.5.2-0.mh.2.src.rpm
http://mharris.ca/pub/el/5/SRPMS/mozilla-filesystem-1.9-4.src.rpm

http://www.linux.org.uk/~mharris/pub/el/5/SRPMS/xulrunner-1.9.1.2-0.mh.1.src.rpm
http://www.linux.org.uk/~mharris/pub/el/5/SRPMS/firefox-3.5.2-0.mh.2.src.rpm
http://www.linux.org.uk/~mharris/pub/el/5/SRPMS/mozilla-filesystem-1.9-4.src.rpm

The new rpms *should* build with rpmbuild now without having to manually
define 'rhel' or 'dist'.

For the time being at least, I'll be trying to update to any new
mozilla.org releases of xulrunner+firefox that come down the pipe ASAP,
and also resync the spec files with any relevant changes that occur in
the Fedora packaging as well.

Hopefully it wont be *too* much longer until Red Hat includes Firefox
3.5 as an official EL5 update.  I suspect it'll probably come along for
RHEL 5.5 or thereabouts.

Please note that if you need to modify the spec files for any reason and
decide to bump the release number - do not bump the "0." at the
beginning of the Release field.  Add a '.1' or whatever to the end
instead.  This is to ensure that any "official" packages that might get
released in the future by Red Hat/CentOS proper, will upgrade over my
custom packages cleanly without interference.

Enjoy.




- --
Mike A. Harris
http://mharris.ca  |  https://twitter.com/mikeaharris

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