[RFC] Port for nspluginwrapper

[John Nielsen]

On Friday 30 March 2007 10:01:07 pm Dave Grochowski wrote:
> I wrote a port for nspluginwrapper, which you can find at:
>
> http://elvis.rowan.edu/~grocho98/nspluginwrapper.tar.bz2
>
> For those who do not know what it is, you can find the homepage at:
>
> http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwrapper/
>
> Basically, it allows you to run Linux/i386 browser plugins on the native
> browsers of other architectures and operating systems. To use it, simply
> install the appropriate plugins you would like from ports (I tried it
> with www/linux-flashplugin9, but others should work just as well) and
> then install nspluginwrapper. As a regular user, run "nspluginwrapper -v
> -a -i" to automagically find the plugins on you system and enable them
> for use in Firefox. Now, the plugins should work in your browser. I
> tried it with Flash 9 and both the graphics and sound worked.
> Unfortunately, Flash 9 is a bit buggy for me and crashed frequently, but
> I had the same issue when using the plugin with www/linux-firefox as well.
>
> I think the port is pretty complete, but I have only tried it on
> FreeBSD/i386 6-STABLE and FreeBSD/i386 7-CURRENT. It should work on
> amd64, but I don't have a machine to test it on. If the port is
> acceptable, I would not mind maintaining it, except for the fact that I
> obviously do not have a commit bit (though that probably is not a huge
> issue).

Just in time for my upgrade to -CURRENT! I downloaded your port today and the 
first time I tried to build it I got a "can't find -ldl" error right off the 
bat. I went in and removed the -ldl flag from the dist's Makefile both places 
it appears and was then able to build and install the port, but it didn't 
find any plugins and when I manually pointed it at libflashplayer.so 
(linux-flashplugin7) or nppdf.so it said they weren't valid.

Thinking that my tinkering probably broke something, I deinstalled the port, 
removed my previous work directory, and tried to build it again. This time it 
built just fine without any modifications on my part. (I even went in to the 
work directory after the fact to see if the Makefile still contained the -ldl 
flags. It did.) I installed it again and this time around it detected the 
Flash plugin automatically and accepted nppdf.so when I ran it with the -i 
flag. Both work just fine in (native) Firefox 2.0. In fact, I can even view 
videos using the Flash plugin; something that never worked with the 
linuxpluginwrapper. And the sound synchronization is definitely "not worse" 
than with linuxpluginwrapper. It's probably even better; my box is busy 
rebuilding OpenOffice.org at the moment so it probably wasn't a good test.

I don't know what was different the second time I built the port.. very odd. 
But I'm happy it works now.

Thanks very much for the port!

By the way, you don't have to be a commiter to be a port maintainer. Just 
follow the instructions in the Porter's Handbook and submit a PR with your 
new port. You'll actually have to do some pretty fast talking to get OUT of 
being the maintainer once you do. :)

JN