[blfs-support] blfs-support Digest, Vol 1057, Issue 1

[Paul Rogers]

I suggest you check 52.8.0esr (I hope 52.6.0 was a typo) in case
that too needs newer python(s).

No, it wasn't. 52.6 was the version on Firefox's website. But that's OK, I'm not finished here.

I explored BLFS' patches, 8.0 used FF-51. Reading some of the patches I discovered "gentoo.org/~anarchy/mozilla/patchsets/" which had a tarball of patches for 52.5, which I figured was "close enough". I downloaded that, expanded 52.6, made a & b, applied the graphite2 & harfbuzz patches, diffed a -Naur (We all know Peter Naur of BNF fame.) of a to b, to make my own graphite2_harfbuzz patch. Then trying building 52.6 barfed again at libpng. I commented out --with-system-png, and tried again.

I'll come back to that later, since it is an ESR, and figure out what's going wrong with png, but right now I want to get on with building another hundred and some packages to get to a testable milestone. Maybe I have made it hard on myself, but unlike using some other distros, I know what my issues have been (even documented in my "glitches" file) and the decisions I took. Once I get to the build completed milestone, I have three milestones more of testing & refinements before I consider it my "Golden Egg"! (A functioning LFS is my "Lead Pipe". With my 289 more packages to complete "the build" I get to my somewhat messy "Iron Horse". That gets packaged and cloned becoming a clean if perhaps a little glitchey "Brass Monkey". That gets polished to a functional "Silver Sword", and then buffed to "Golden Egg". I did learn a lot, if a bit dated now, about software projects in my professional career--milestones are important.)

So, as soon as the build completed I gave it a "smoke test". It came up, hooked up with Mozilla start page, let me configure a menu bar, and read the BLFS book on the system. So, I won't claim "Resolved" yet, just good enough for now. I'll come back to FF in Brass Monkey.

Thank you very much for being a mentor on this! I'm judging 52.?esr somewhat better than the 55.0.3, with the Spectre mitigations you recommended.