200869 - Need support to remove files from a jar file by putting a '-' followed by the file name in a jar.mn file

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

something that mscott needs for minotaur:

Need support to remove files from a jar file by putting a '-' followed by the
file name in a jar.mn file. This will help us reduce our footprint quite a bit
by letting us remove unnecessary chrome. Should only be a line or two of perl. 

mscott has a patch from an external contributor in hand.

once mscott lands that, we'll need that to fix a bugscape bug, introduced by bug
#191171

bug #191171 will add a html file and a gif for the mailnews start page.  but
netscape (and minotaur?) don't want that bloat, so we'll use the '-' trick to
remove them.

there might be other instances where '-' could be used to slim down ns builds,
embedding builds, or simplify the embedding build process.

Comment 1

[Alec Flett]

I talked with mscott about this a while back and have had some followup thoughts.

the way this works in embedding is that we unpack ALL the .jars and then just
build a single embed.jar file from a manifest file in embedding/config - that
way we are guaranteed to only add the files that we KNOW we want.. I suggest
mail might do the same - that way they don't have to constantly track new files
to browser... (i.e. every time the browser adds a new file, minotaur would have
to add a "-" line for it.. sounds like a pain to me!)

Comment 2

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Thunderbird seems to be doing just fine without this.

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Yep, we went with bug 286806 instead. I suspect the removal of all the + lines where we want our fork of something make it a net win, though "ifdef the main jar.mn, and only use an absolute path in your own jar.mn for the bits you want" is only a solution when you're repacking something with the cooperation of its owners, while +/- would work even for something that wouldn't let you stick an ifdef in it.