811586 - Statically built Firefox distribution for Linux

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Kai Hendry]

Attachment: lsof.txt

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11

Steps to reproduce:

Extract firefox-16.0.2.tar.bz2 




Actual results:

Found 81 files in the tar.bz2, which has about 20 .so files...

Also when running on a system: (see attached lsof.txt) there are 51 dependent system .so files. For a distro maintainer I don't which ones are necessarily tested/support by yourselves. Hence when maintaining Webconverger I have to be very careful when upgrading one of the dependent dynamically linked libraries. It's nerve racking. :/


Expected results:

Ideally just a self-contained binary firefox and a defaults directory for preferences.

Comment 1

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

It's possible we had something like this in the past, but I may be mis-remembering. Regardless, we'll need a build target before it's of any use to releng, so reassigning over to Build::Config.

I don't know how much traction this will get though. None (or very, very few) of the Linux distros actually use packages made by Mozilla, preferring instead to create their own bundles. Under those circumstances, it's unlikely we'll invest too much effort in packaging contortions on linux. :/

Comment 2

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I don't think we're interested in doing this. Dependencies are a pain, and we try to limit them as much as possible, but we're not going to bundle everything, it's just not feasible.