vanilla wrote:
> To be fair, compiling the Linux kernel is orders of magnitude simpler than compiling a Firefox-based web browser,
Yeah, that has been my impression as well. I can build through a complete BLFS build (thankfully the instructions
are simple:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/) but the web-related components have become really annoying.
I don't just mean firefox as such, but simply the whole web-stack which becomes increasingly complex and
"inter-connected" on dependencies. Just try compiling chromium from source on a linux-from-scratch build;
I even ran out of memory and my machine isn't the worst (16 GB RAM; to be fair I ran out of RAM with LLVM
before in the past, so perhaps 16 GB is now too little actually ... even though you can tweak a lot and
work around many of these issues).
Not only the firefox-build system, even though this is outdated like crazy (
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/vi ... refox.html)
but also the javascript-related parts (spidermonkey); even
openssl (just compare the build system to
libressl; openssl + gnutls is kind of needed on linux systems IMO).
For some reason, some projects have a hard time moving to something slightly less annoying, such as cmake
or meson/ninja. All build systems have problems; some just add more problems than others. Personally I
quite like meson/ninja. Note that I use automated compilations via a set of ruby scripts, where providing the
URL alone is almost sufficient for the rest to get "figured out". Whenever custom build rules are used, things
tend to become more fragile and volatile, so I actually prefer "modern standardizations" e. g. via cmake or
meson - and yeah, the latter have problems too, just fewer problems than GNU autoconfigure or custom
set of rules via mozconfig (which often mandates people having to use python version2 still right? Or
perl based old autoconf ...)
I have not yet tried to compile palemoon, mostly because firefox and mozilla already shocked me for the
rest of my life here ... even upgrading glibc is simpler.
(The kernel is actually quite easy to compile, just takes some time to do so. The longest build times I
have these days is when I try to compile qt from source, whoa does this take a long time ... )