On Wed, 5 Mar 2008 05:41:50 +0100 Predrag Ivanovic wrote:
On Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:48:13 -0500 Brett Goulder wrote:
Attached is a Firefox port modified with all the changes I intend to push into the one in opt once 2.0.0.13 is released, mostly it's further debloating for Firefox, Swiftweasel [http://swiftweasel.tuxfamily.org/] already does that, iirc, so why not just package that?
We are packaging upstream Firefox, as built for CRUX. In addition, Swiftweasal, Swiftfox, etc do not debloat Firefox, they build it with riced-out CFLAGS in the hopes of gaining tiny improvements in performance, that's not the point of this, the point is improving our build of Firefox.
This reduces disk space consumption, improves start-time performance and doesn't break any applications that build against Firefox. Mozilla's own binary builds are built this way, in fact. With large disks these days, disk space is not that much of an issue.If several Mb saved this way are important to you, then, by all means, do it, but it's not worth the effort, unless in special/different circumstances, which do not apply here (again IMWHO :) ).
It is not an extensive amount of work, saving a few megabytes here and there is a worthwhile cause, considering that Firefox uncompressed is about a ~48-52MB install for just a browser, saving disk space is worthwhile, why waste disk space for no apparent reason?
Start-time performance?Firefox startup is one-time event(start it up,use it, keep it open for a few days until it either chews large chunk of RAM or extensions need updating, then close/restart it).
Not everyone uses Firefox this way, just because you do does not mean everyone does. Again, debloating in addition to reducing the speed at which it starts are both worthwhile improvements when it causes the users no grievances (hence the point of testing this).
Anyway, if Mozilla's own binary builds are made that way, why just don't package and use them?Or Swiftweasel, for that matter? Or Debian's Iceweasel, debranded version?
As I already said, we're packaging Firefox, not Swiftweasel or Iceweasel or any other modification of Firefox. The reason we use our own builds is two-fold: First, CRUX is a primarily source-based distro, not a binary distro, unless it would be entirely insane to build it from source (I.E. OpenOffice) or impossible due the program being closed-source, then we try to build from source. Second, The official builds provided by Mozilla do not include development headers, we cannot build plugins against a pure binary build.
Crux philosophy is KISS, right?So why not do this in a simple, most elegant manner possible i.e in a way it was done so far? If you really want 'debloated' version of FF, use one of the alternatives above, and/or push alternative port to opt/contrib. Pedja
KISS doesn't mean we utilise some other build of Firefox merely because they've already packaged it, if we were to start doing that, we would have to start packaging everyone elses packages for coreutils and libpng and this-and-that. KISS is a design philosophy, not a packaging philosophy. Iceweasal, Swiftweasal, etc are not "debloated" versions, I think you're confusing reducing the disk footprint of a Firefox installation with tweaking performance, I am not attempting to gain significant improvements in performance by removing files which waste diskspace and improving how Firefox is built, I am attempting to reduce the wasted disk space that is so prevalent in Firefox. -- ~predatorfreak GnuPG Public key: http://pred.dcaf-security.org/dcafsec-pub-gpgkey.asc