RFC: What to do with Mozilla

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 15:24, Philip Paeps wrote:
> 
> Yes, that's true.  Expanding on the original braindump would be to use ports
> like www/mozilla14, www/mozilla15, www/mozilla16 and www/mozilla-firebird
> which refer to www/mozilla and set de correct pkgnamesuffix and build with the
> right knobs.

I think this would get cumbersome if we had to create a new mozillaX
directory for each version.  I don't think it's necessary to have every
version in the tree forever.  Previously we tracked the vendor
(ultra-stable) track, the stable track, and the development snapshot
track.  The issue at hand is do we continue with three tracks, or is two
sufficient.

> 
> > and it would be far more difficult for people to search for the newest
> > version of Mozilla (go to Freshports, search for Mozilla - you'll find
> > Mozilla 1.4, because that's the default. Where is 1.5? Where is Firebird?
> > Same with searching using make search).
> 
> Indeed.  I think this issue would also be solved with different ports all
> building the same port with different knobs and suffixes?

I don't see how this can happen.  Each port has its own set of
distfiles.

> 
> It would be nice if we could split out Mozilla as a program and Mozilla as a
> dependency.  Some things which cite Mozilla as a dependency probably only need
> Gecko or bits of Gecko, in which case they would specify USE_MOZILLA=gecko and
> potentially WANT_MOZILLA_GECKO_VER=15 or something to that effect, and they'd
> magically get something like www[devel?]/mozilla-gecko[15?] as a dependency.
> 
> Currently, people (users and maintainers) need to keep track of heaps of
> versions and ports and are probably spending a lot of time compiling things
> they'll never use and are never even used internally by the programs depending
> on them.

We tried this with the -embedded ports, and it didn't work.  No one used
them, and they were broken to boot.  Most users simply installed a
full-blown Mozilla, so they could have, for example, Galeon and Mozilla
as potential browsers.  They didn't want to spend the time compiling
mozilla-embedded just to have Galeon.

As for the useless options, we've tried to make Mozilla as customizable
as possible so that you can turn off just about everything.  That can
greatly reduce compile time.

Joe

> 
>  - Philip
-- 
PGP Key : http://www.marcuscom.com/pgp.asc


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