Would it be difficult to produce a GTK-2 Linux version of Epyrus?

[geraldh]

I have programmed quite a bit in the distant past, mostly in Blitz Basic on the Amiga, but also dabbled in 6502 assembler FORTH and javascript. I use the Palemoon Linux GTK-2 version as I prefer the look of it to the GTK-3 version and I'm just wondering how difficult it would be for me to get up to speed and produce a GTK-2 version of Epyrus? I'm not expecting a detailed response . I'm just wondering how much learning/work it might entail?

[micwoj92]

The build process should be same as of any other UXP application, with the main difference being .mozconfig file, if you see some "gtk3" mentions then you need to change it to "gtk2" and basically that's all.
Build instructions are located at http://www.epyrus.org/build.html. With maybe some more relevant information to be found at https://developer.palemoon.org/build/.

[andyprough]

EDIT: @microwj92 beat me to it - see his post above

I have programmed quite a bit in the distant past, mostly in Blitz Basic on the Amiga, but also dabbled in 6502 assembler FORTH and javascript. I use the Palemoon Linux GTK-2 version as I prefer the look of it to the GTK-3 version and I'm just wondering how difficult it would be for me to get up to speed and produce a GTK-2 version of Epyrus? I'm not expecting a detailed response . I'm just wondering how much learning/work it might entail?

I'm pretty sure you would follow these build instructions - http://www.epyrus.org/build.html

And when you create your .mozconfig file at the bottom of the instructions, you would change these two lines -

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ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk3

would be

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ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk2

and

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export MOZ_PKG_SPECIAL=gtk3

would be

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export MOZ_PKG_SPECIAL=gtk2

It should build pretty easily, just make sure you have all your build dependencies installed.

[athenian200]

Actually, it is pretty easy to produce one. I don't publish one officially, but that's solely because I don't want the extra release engineering and the burden of additional Linux testing, when I already don't use the Linux version as much as the Windows version.

At first I was prepared to get upset thinking someone was hounding me for an official GTK2 release again, but if you just want to build one yourself... no problem, just don't ask me for support if it has any problems that can't be reproduced in the official GTK3 build.

If you look at the official build instructions, just change this line...

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ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk3

To this.

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ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk2

That's literally it, that's the difference. Again, no problem with people building it themselves. But you are even more "on your own" with it than you are with Epyrus normally...

The MOZ_PKG_SPECIAL line just changes the name of the package for naming clarification, you can remove that entirely if you're self-building technically... changing it to gtk2 is advised if you're compiling both a GTK2 and GTK3 version to run side-by-side, but other than that you could do without it. I leave it in for official builds mostly because the updater infrastructure I setup was designed around the name being that way.

[geraldh]

Thank you all for your advice on this. When I get a bit of free time I'll have a go and report back .

[geraldh]

Thanks again for all your help. I've had a few goes at this and came unstuck a couple of times, but I've got it going now and to my eyes it looks much nicer than the gtk-3 version on my Linux Mint machines. The problems I had seemed mostly to revolve around Python 2.7 having been upgraded in Mint 21 and 22 to Python 3.X. One of the required commands seems to have been deprecated in Python 3.X. Mint 20.X still has Python 2.7 and that machine did the job. My i5-7200U took about an hour to build it. It also took me a while to find the package, it was in obj-x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/dist/

It seems to work OK so far, but I've only tested it on newsgroups so far. The only anomaly I've found is the doubled up down arrows with the Classic TB2 theme (see attached screenshot). On the gtk-3 version the with the Classic TB2 theme, the duplicate down arrows also show up, but as an empty box, so there's some weird Linux theme thing going on there. Even with the doubled up arrows I prefer it .

Epyrus gtk-2.png

epyrus gtk-3.png

[geraldh]

I've solved the doubled arrows in Epyrus gtk-2 with the classictb2 theme, though my modified version may no longer work correctly with the original gtk-3 version of Epyrus. I just deleted dropmarker.css.

ClassicTB2-gtk-2.png

[geraldh]

I've made a few more tweaks to the theme which seems to have ironed out all the graphical anomalies and my Epyrus GTK-2 seems to be working well on Mint 22. The executable, however, appears as a "shared library" in the file manager on Mint versions before 22 and will only run via the terminal. This seems to be the issue.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1148680 ... executable

It seems that I have to add compile/build options -fno-pic and -no-pie. Do I add these as an option in mozconfig or somewhere else?
Hopefully my last question . Thank you