233548 - Provide RPM

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 641210

(Firefox Build System :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Lane Inman]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031110 Firebird/0.7

Don't care if RPM is not your favorite installer.  I am not a big fan of it
myself, but it is a native packaging format for a large number of linux boxes
out there; not providing it is not "advancing the cause".  

The easier it is for Joe User to install, the more likely it will be installed.
 Overall I really like the product, but installation itself may stop me from
installing it from now on.  Easy means the same as other packages, not a
different name of a different automated script to do.  


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

the problem with creating "official" RPMs is that they don't work that well
across distros and versions.  Most of the major distributions do package Firefox
and those should be available in the RPM repositories in the next day or so.

A linux installer is planned for 0.9

Comment 2

[Michael Hendy (Hendikins)]

-> build-config and confirming

Comment 3

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

the problem is, that firefox 0.9 is not RPM-packager friendly. I had no success
creating a package which works after a simple installation for non-root users :-(

Comment 4

[Lane Inman]

Sounds like this is an architectural issue that would occur with multiple
platforms...  Argue how you will, but yet another installer is fairly pointless.
 Shy of a universal packager cross platform, you are still limitted to the major
packages; and further more, if there is a desire to get normal users to use it;
native packaging must be used.  If you have a universal packager that only you
use, it is not too universal.

Having created packages for AIX, RedHat, Solaris, HP-UX; its not that hard,
which is why I wonder why people don't take the time to do it.  ( I imagine with
some post/pre scripts it is not too hard to accomplish ).  Unfortunately, I have
a Ph.D. Dissertation to complete before I put time into this.

On the comment of "not cross-platform", how is it any different than what your
packagers currently do?  You still have to take into account certain files for
each platform; the advantage with using RPM, depot's, pkg's, msi's, etc, is that
someone else has solved how to handle the "administratia" of the package.  I've
written multi-platform installer scripts (sorry, private sector); the only
reason its not done is because it is boring; and people don't like reading up on
them, but the packager should just be a build script....

-Lane

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I'm likely to WONTFIX this in favor of autopackage if we get that working, bug 277066.

Comment 6

[Richard Lloyd]

Just a qnote that I've started an attempt at "automatically" creating an RPM for Fedora Core (to start with, other RPM-based platforms to follow) - see:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=111139

I couldn't do much with the SeaMonkey FTP tree downloads because for some strange reason they haven't followed the same layout convention as Firefox and Thunderbird. Still, it shows that it *is* possible to create RPMs automatically and this is definitely a preferred method (using a native installer rather than a third party one like autopackage) of packaging up the contents of the binary .tar.gz file.

BTW, is there any reason why .tar.gz's for Linux are only available as "linux-i686" binaries? Why aren't there 64-bit builds as well?

Comment 7

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

I think we should dupe this to bug 641210.