559891 - update README for 2.1

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Installer, defect)

Description

[Robert Kaiser]

The READMEs need to be updated before we ship 2.1, e.g. for the dropping of Tigeer support.

Comment 1

[Robert Kaiser]

The Tiger and PPC drop has been updated, not sure what else there's on the plate for this.

Comment 2

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> The Tiger and PPC drop has been updated, not sure what else there's on the
> plate for this.

Well, suite/locales/en-US/installer/windows/README.txt:

   - Windows 2000, XP or Vista
   - Intel Pentium class processor (500 MHz or faster recommended)
   - 128 MB RAM
   - 50 MB free hard disk space

Comment 3

[Jens Hatlak (:InvisibleSmiley)]

Attachment: patch [Checkin: comment 6]

Synced with:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0/system-requirements/

Debian Lenny still seems to fulfill the requirements, but it's not testing anymore. Don't know about the other distributions, so any feedback and checking from Linux users is welcome. Feel free to request review from more people.

Also I changed the wording regarding "Pentium" so that it doesn't appear as if we only supported that processor type (as in "but I got a Core one, does it work?").

Comment 4

[Jens Hatlak (:InvisibleSmiley)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Debian Lenny still seems to fulfill the requirements, but it's not testing
> anymore. Don't know about the other distributions, so any feedback and checking
> from Linux users is welcome.

Repeating from the patch, these would be our minimum library requirements:
GTK+ 2.10, GLib 2.12, Pango 1.14, X.Org 1.0, libstdc++ 4.3.

Also we'd now say we support the following distributions, of which I only checked Debian:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
- Fedora Core 6
- ubuntu 6.10 ("Edgy")
- Debian "Lenny"
- openSUSE 10.2

I now started looking at RHEL 5, or more precisely CentOS 5 which is binary compatible. It turns out it fulfills all requirements except libstdc++, which is 4.1.2 (libstdc++.so.6.0.8) for RHEL 5 [1]. Then I found this [2] which pointed at bug 621704.

I could have stopped there but was curious to see whether this actually applies to us as well. Turns out it doesn't: Installed CentOS 5 into a VM, downloaded current Linux 32-bit nightlies of both FF 4.0.1pre and SM 2.1pre, extracted and run them. While FF quit with a message like bug 621704, SM started happily. Checked with 2.1b3-real, same result.

Callek, some questions:
1. Which compiler version is used for building the nightlies?
2. Will we continue to build nightlies and the final release with the same compiler version?
3. Is the difference to Firefox deliberate or are we missing something?

I think we need to clarify the above before finalizing the README (and checking the other distributions). BTW for Debian you can use [3], more package lists for the above distributions welcome!

[1] http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5/os/i386/CentOS/
[2] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2075033
[3] http://packages.debian.org/lenny/allpackages?format=txt.gz

Comment 5

[Robert Kaiser]

We're compiling with gcc 4.5 now and statically link in libstdc++, which is why we don't depend on any libstdc++ right now, having one bundled ourselves. This might change again on trunk when a better solution comes along, but for 2.1, we can drop the libstdc++ requirement completely.

Comment 6

[Jens Hatlak (:InvisibleSmiley)]

Comment on attachment 524822 [details] [diff] [review]
patch [Checkin: comment 6]

http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/cb2a7f539ffd

(In reply to comment #5)
> We're compiling with gcc 4.5 now and statically link in libstdc++, which is why
> we don't depend on any libstdc++ right now, having one bundled ourselves. This
> might change again on trunk when a better solution comes along, but for 2.1, we
> can drop the libstdc++ requirement completely.

Thanks, pushed with that removed.

I considered further checking the other distributions but eventually gave up:
- https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/collections/id/4 lists packages but with no way to see the actual versions,
- http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fedora has not all packages listed (but e.g. GTK+),
- http://packages.ubuntu.com/ doesn't allow to search edgy (tried modifying the URL, no luck),
- http://software.opensuse.org/search even lists multiple distributions but openSUSE 10.2 is not among the options.

In the end we're listing ancient versions there. If even those mostly fulfill the requirements, later, more current versions (which are hopefully more likely to be installed on users' machines) should be safe.

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to comment #6)
> - http://software.opensuse.org/search even lists multiple distributions but
> openSUSE 10.2 is not among the options.

I guess so, as 10.2 has been out of support for a long time now.