621175 - Getting the PPC patches for Firefox 4.0 from the TenFourFox team into mozilla-2.0

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[ChrisX]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20101123 SeaMonkey/2.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; rv:2.0b7pre) Gecko/20101008 Firefox/SeaMonkey/2.1b1

SeaMonkey 2.1b1 user interface draws incorrectly on Mac OS X 10.5.8 PPC. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Startup SeaMonkey 2.1b1
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Interface looks unfinished. Pink triangles block content, parts of the interface are missing or show up only occasionally. 

Expected Results:  
Should look similar or identical to 2.0 stable.

PowerBook G4 1333 MHz, Mac OS X 10.5.8 with stock ATI Mobility Radeon 9700. I cannot test latest trunk because it's Intel only.

Comment 1

[ChrisX]

See screenshot http://postimage.org/image/22sao1ozo/

Comment 2

[Philip Chee]

Mozilla dropped support for Mac PPC on trunk (Gecko 2.0) so our PPC builds are pretty broken. For SeaMonkey 2.1b2 we have dropped support for PPC and will only support x32/x64 architectures.

Comment 3

[ChrisX]

Is it possible to make something like this?
http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
A SeaMonkey 2.1 build for PPC? I'd gladly volunteer to help testing. I've been using Netscape/Mozilla/SeaMonkey since 1997. Do I really need to switch to Firefox or Safari to stay up to date?

Comment 4

[Philip Chee]

Ah, SeaMonkey runs on top of the same backend as Firefox so it should be possible. However we are short of developers (especially developers who know the Mac) and are very short of build machines. So I regret to say that the SeaMonkey team won't be putting any resources into this (although we certainly would like not to have dropped PPC support so late in the development cycle). Perhaps someone on the tenfourfox team could look into how feasible this is.

Comment 5

[ChrisX]

Thanks for your answer. Sad day, but it's better, then, to concentrate all rescources on the FF/PPC builds to make this a stable Gecko 2.0 product. I'll keep SM 2.0 around as a backup browser.

Comment 6

[Karsten Düsterloh]

(In reply to comment #5)
> it's better, then, to concentrate all rescources on the FF/PPC builds

There won't be a PPC Firefox 4...

Please note that PPC fixes to mozilla-central (i.e. Firefox) are wanted and do have chances to get into the repo, it's just that neither SeaMonkey nor Mozilla as such will try to do it. Patches are welcome!

Please file new bugs for specific PPC issues if you are willing to help out patching them!

Comment 7

[ChrisX]

> There won't be a PPC Firefox 4...
I have FF 4 beta 8 open right now on my G4 PowerBook. It's not an "official" build, of course, it's a small community effort. But then, Mozilla/SeaMonkey became a small community effort itself when Firefox was declared the Big Thing. If official PPC support is dropped by Mozilla, and there are no official PPC trunk builds anymore to test, how do I file new bugs? From the inofficial builds?

Comment 8

[Philip Chee]

Please CC this to Cameron and the rest of the Tenfourfox team:

Well the OS/2 port is still going strong with the OS2 community submitting patches to the mozilla tree. Ironically now that PPC has been officially dropped by Mozilla, it would be easier to get your patches into mozilla 2.0 since your changes would have the magic keyword (NPOTB - Not Part of The [default] Build).

I presume that the 10.4Fx team are maintaining their own set of private patches. The first step is to join the discussion on the mozilla mailing list [e-mail]. (https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform) or the bidirectionally gated nntp newsgroup: news://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.dev.platform. The next step would be to get the private patches into a form that would be acceptable to Mozilla. For example they would have to be properly IFDEFed so as not to affect x32/x64 bit Mac Intel builds. The second thing to remember is to submit your patch set in the form of several smaller and easily reviewed patches. Submitting one omnibus megabyte patch will just make any reviewer run screaming away. I think that since the Nanojit changes are relatively self contained you could try submitting those to the Mozilla js-engine team first.

Comment 9

[Cameron Kaiser [:spectre]]

Thanks for the CC, Philip.

The other problem is that the private changesets (they're on the download page) also have all the various bustage fixes for Tiger, which 10.4Fx supports and which I'm pretty sure will be WONTFIX. I'm getting a POWER6 system for another purpose and I might try separating the POWER ISA-specific changes, which probably will be accepted, from the 10.4 ones, which I doubt will be.

The nanojit is its own private hell right now.

Comment 10

[Cameron Kaiser [:spectre]]

Btw, to ChrisX, turn off hardware acceleration. I bet that is (part of) the problem. 10.4Fx has it turned off completely.

Comment 11

[ChrisX]

Turning off hardware acceleration (via mozilla.widget.render-mode 0) does not fix this bug for me.

Comment 12

[Cameron Kaiser [:spectre]]

Bug 624164 is the PowerPC nanojit.

Comment 13

[nello martuscielli]

now the submitted patch doesn't apply to firefox-4rc2 sources.
Anyway how activate nanojit_ppc during a build from source on linux ppc?