FreeBSD ports available for Pale Moon, Epyrus, Basilisk?

[unifuzius]

Hello,

my deepest respect for your achievements! After years of messing with omni.jar, I gave up on Mozilla de-regressing... Quiet happy with what LibreWolf do for the unavoidable daily browser usage.
To my surprise, downloading and invoking Pale Moon for FreeBSD/gtk3 works without any issue. And that's not just about toggling stupid settings... Incredible how smooth Pale Moon runs on FreeBSD!
I'm wondering why there's no official port. Same applies to Epyrus and Basilisk... never heard a word about them before very end of 2024 - ie today.

Can you share a shar? Or do you build for FreeBSD completely without the ports infrasturcture?

Thanks a lot for this great projects!

[Basilisk-Dev]

My understanding is that the FreeBSD ports tree does not allow any package that requires Python 2.x to build. Due to the fact that we need Python 2 (although there are patches to use Tauthon instead of Python 2), they refuse to put any of our programs in their ports tree.

https://www.freshports.org/www/palemoon/

[Moonchild]

We offer FreeBSD binaries on our main download site. This is built in a known-good configuration by a trusted community dev. Unfortunately the ports system has too many build toolchain restrictions to be usable and the Pale Moon ports branch has not had a maintainer for years.

[unifuzius]

Thanks for the clarification - python2 build dependency explains all... Very unfortunate the ports tree was made poudriere compatible, instead of keeping it as it served well for FreeBSD users over decades.
I very much disagree with the 'cleanup' policy and abused portmanager power by two or three individuals upstream. Not only they remove ports for self-pleasing reasons. Unfortunately a lot of valuable/useful and perfectly well building applications vanished during the recent years, following salient nepotism patterns: One sets a expiration date for weak, none or false reasons (concealed in a batch commit with a lot of other well-reasoned deprecation/expiration changes), and another one deletes it afterwards in batch too, so complaining results in either 'I didn't remove' or 'it has expired'. This is a severe power abuse in my opinion and harms the project... back to topic:
Happy to see there already was/is a port. Since I use ISO-repo based deployment methods/tools, I'd prefer to install palemoon as standard package (by pkg(8), especially on machines without internet access - that's my main use case currently, ie. managing older web-UI-only network components).
Thanks a lot for giving us this incredibly valuable masterpiece for free!

[Moonchild]

I very much disagree with the 'cleanup' policy and abused portmanager power by two or three individuals upstream. Not only they remove ports for self-pleasing reasons. Unfortunately a lot of valuable/useful and perfectly well building applications vanished during the recent years, following salient nepotism patterns

It's unfortunate.
The issue in our case is that python2 is a build dependency: our build system explicitly relies on Python 2.7 and arbitrary reasons to nuke it in the ports for one O.S. isn't enough to spend months (at the very least) trying to rewrite it in Python 3 for all O.S. targets (and/or the next version, or the next), undoubtedly opening up a ton of new bugs. I fully understand that they might not want it in run-time environments, but we don't rely on it there. It's only our build environment that requires it. That simple premise is apparently too difficult for some people to understand and/or accept.

[Kruppt]

Can they not use? :
https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv
You can install any versions of python available,
and easily switch between versions in the shell.

[Basilisk-Dev]

Can they not use? :
https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv
You can install any versions of python available,
and easily switch between versions in the shell.

They could but they explicitly chose not to do so. I use pyenv to do builds of Basilisk with Python 2.7 on MacOS as Homebrew has no Python 2 package available.

Not using pyenv for builds or allowing Python 2.7 in their ports tree, and instead deprecating their ports for software that needs Python 2 to build is an intentional action, and in my opinion it's somewhat malicious toward their users.

[Moonchild]

{it} is an intentional action, and in my opinion it's somewhat malicious toward their users.

I'm honestly not sure if it's malicious, i.e. born from malintent. I think it's ultimately the problem of trying to market a philosophy rather than an O.S., and the BSDs tend to lean pretty heavy on the philosophy side of free software. I do have to agree though that the practical result of purposefully ignoring the wishes and desires of your user base at large for such a philosophy is pretty much the definition of dogma (or whatever term is applicable outside of religious context) and definitely isn't helping users be comfortable or happy with their human interface to the hardware.
Perhaps it's just a matter of good intentions/wishful thinking being taken too far.