can't build firefox 1.0.4 on 4.10

Alex Zbyslaw xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Thu May 19 01:47:17 PDT 2005


Timothy Smith wrote:

> Alex Zbyslaw wrote:
>
>> Why aren't you compiling this from the port?  With a port someone has 
>> already gone to the trouble of making FreeBSD specific patches to fix 
>> things like configuration issues.  Is there a reason for trying to 
>> re-invent all those wheels?
>>
>>
> well whats the lastest port, how quickly are ports brought up todate 
> with the current version? i'd like to be able to compile it myself and 
> not have to rely on someone else.

In the case of firefox, the answer seems to be "pretty damn quickly".  The same is true of most popular ports.  I can only think of one port which I have which doesn't seem to have kept up with the original (fcron).  With a port you *do* compile it yourself (it's packages which are pre-compiled and I rarely touch those).  What you get are checksums, patches, dependencies calculated automatically.  

If you are desperate for a version of something which is newer than the port (or, older), you can still recompile it yourself, though if it's as complicated as firefox you are likely to run in to trouble.  You also get a good record of what exactly is installed on your system (pkg_info) and semi-automatic info about what needs upgrading (cvsup and portupgrade, which I highky recommend; or the newer portmanager, but that dumps core for me).

In the time you've been having all this trouble, I compiled and installed one version of firefox (1.03).  Then came various potential security holes, and version 1.04 came out, which I then upgraded to.  The only hassle was waiting for it to compile!  With portupgrade it even remebered which configuration options I had picked the first time, and re-used them the second time.

--Alex




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