[CentOS] Firefox 3.5 Issues

Mon Jul 13 19:47:54 UTC 2009
Mike A. Harris <mharris at mharris.ca>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Michael A. Peters wrote:
> Michael A. Peters wrote:
> 
>>
>> My suspicion is that it has to do with the language packs, since the
>> same src.rpm built w/o disabling language packs doesn't crash in
>> CentOS 5.3 on either arch.

I doubt that is the case.  The language packs are optional plugins
essentially, which the Fedora builds include in the rpm directly, but
which upstream does not include by default.  They are completely
non-essential and the majority of people using Firefox do not have them
installed - except those using distributions that include them forcibly
such as Fedora/RHEL/CentOS.  I prefer to not have the language packs by
default and let people who need them get them themselves from the
mozilla site.

What is more likely the case, is that the act of rebuilding it changed
something, and I would bet money that if you forcibly disable the
language packs and rebuild it, that you'll end up with something that
still works, because something else is changing during rebuild.

I build for the i686 target for example, which has to be manually
specified.  If someone does a straight rebuild they'll get i386, and
that could potentially change things for them.  There are lots of other
variables too.

Ultimately though, the most sensible thing to do is to get it built
using mock in standardized clean buildroots, with all dependencies
properly specified and vetted.  That will come in the future.


> I feel like such a dope.
> 
> I forgot to run createrepo on my private i386 repo so when I removed the
> mh built 3.5 and yum installed firefox to get what I built, it grabbed
> 3.0.11 and I didn't even notice.

hehe

> I realized this when I looked at the spec file and saw there was no way
> in hot firey place that the default start page could be anything other
> than the fedora start page.

I should probably update the package to point to CentOS defaults in the
future too.  I was just in a hurry for firefox 3.5 chocolatey goodness
that I didn't want to muck around with it excessively right away to try
and win any packager of the year awards or anything like that.  hehe


> Since I don't feel like crashing my laptop, I won't check it now - but I
> *don't* know that my i386 ff35 build works with the crash page, I only
> know the x86_64 works - and it probably isn't language packs, the
> language packs aren't in my x86_64 or i386 builds.

Hard to say...  I haven't had firefox crash on any systems I've
installed my builds on yet.  That doesn't mean there isn't a problem
with it though.  Until I get some cleaner builds done in mock on a
sterile build environment, I consider these builds somewhat
"experimental, use at own risk" material.  ;o)  I've got other things on
the go right now though so I haven't looked into it yet as my firefox is
working good.  When 3.5.1 comes out I'll probably take a stab at it
again, and perhaps get it through Karan's buildsystem.


> I thought they were because I saw a bunch of language packs after the
> i386 yum install that grabbed 3.0.11 that I though grabbed 3.5.

Naw, as mentioned above, the language packs are optional components that
are normally not supplied with firefox, and you have to go to the
mozilla website to download them.  Mozilla.org distributes them like
that so that you only get the language datasets for the languages you
require, without bloating the downloads.  To the best of my knowledge,
all of the mozilla.org builds of firefox for all OS platforms exclude
the langpacks by default for this reason.  Fedora/RH just include them
by default to be ready to use out of the box for the widest number of
people out there regardless of what languages they use, and without
requiring them to configure anything.  The tradeoff is that it is
"simpler", but wastes more disk space, network bandwidth, etc.

In the future, if I can figure out an easy way to supply the language
packs in a separate src.rpm package, I'll probably provide an rpm for
that too, but the majority of English-only users out there don't need
them, and it shouldn't have any effect on runtime stability or any
dependencies.

Hope this helps.



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

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with CentOS - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFKW49m4RNf2rTIeUARAjTLAJwPicSAFGD18OqWdVriwnVsmTnkXwCdEn3G
bwzRyL//1+mNDAdhIJJJXFY=
=Mz+f
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----