Untying Firefox from NodeJS
Hello,
as some of you may know, Firefox requires NodeJS these days to build.
Since NodeJS is not available on several architectures such as 32-bit
PowerPC and SPARC, I have been looking into what it would take to untie
Firefox from NodeJS.
Luckily, the Solaris upstream developers have already come up with a
solution which involves writing a wrapper bash script for the node
command [1].
It's designed to have the Firefox build process run the actual node binary
on an x86_64 system to transpile Javascript files, cache these and then
when run on any target which does not support NodeJS, just copy these files
instead of regenerating them.
I have just given this a try on Linux SPARC (sparc64) and as I'm writing
this, I'm actually in the last steps of building Firefox 138.0.1 for
sparc64:
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/glaubitz/firefox-deb/firefox-138.0.1'
dh_installdeb -a
dh_gencontrol -a
dh_md5sums -a
dh_builddeb -a
dpkg-deb: building package 'firefox-dbgsym' in '../firefox-dbgsym_138.0.1-1+sparc64_sparc64.deb'.
dpkg-deb: building package 'firefox' in '../firefox_138.0.1-1+sparc64_sparc64.deb'.
I am still investigating on how this works in detail, but I am very confident
that I will soon be able to provide a patch for Debian's firefox package which
will untie it from the NodeJS build dependency meaning we will be able to bring
back Firefox to all architectures that have Rust support.
Adrian
> [1] https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland/blob/master/components/desktop/firefox/wrapper-node/node
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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