[SOLVED]Quesion about building Palemoon browser from source

[kedaha]

One for stevepusser although anyone else is welcome to comment!
I'm posting this in offtopic because Palemoon's not in Debian's main repository though it'd be nice if it were.
I wish to get rid of Pulseaudio in stretch because I use OSS4 for sound but I've had to configure pulseaudio to use OSS4 otherwise there's no sound in Firefox as I mentioned here, which is a bit of a show-stopper. Firefox, it seems is now pulseaudio-only but I see in the releasenotes-archived for Palemoon version 25.4.0 (2015-05-08):

• Linux: Added OSS support (mutually exclusive with ALSA): configure with --enable-oss

I wonder if this holds good for recent versions? If Pulseaudio's the default in palemoon then, after debianizing the source, I suppose debian/rules could be edited to:

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override_dh_auto_configure:
        dh_auto_configure -- --disable-pulseaudio --enable-oss

By the way, I've installed your palemoon package but it needs pulseaudio too. Thank for reading.

[stevepusser]

There's always the apulse option if you don't want to use pulseaudio. I've got it in my multimedia repo:

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... ert/apulse

I should check to see if I could update it, though.

Mozzilla-type programs such as Pale Moon use a somewhat different way of configuring a build, using a mozconfig file to provide the configuration options. For the sake of convenience, I have it in the debian folder, then have the rules file copy it into the source folder before beginning the build. You should be able to figure out the syntax to add oss and remove pulseaudio support from the existing options in there, if the oss config applies for 27.4.1. The sources for the packages in there are here: http://download.opensuse.org/repositori ... ebian_9.0/

The Pale Moon developers say that PM's unstable if built against gcc-5 or 6, so I have a build of gcc-4.9 in the repo for the Stretch build. The finished product runs just fine on gcc-6.3 in Stretch, though--it just has to build against it. There's some stuff I put in the rules and control file that detects if it's running on an Ubuntu or Debian release that defaults to a newer gcc, then forces the use of gcc-4.9 if that's true. Currently, Ubuntu still has gcc-4.9 in their recent releases, unlike Stretch.

So if you're going to build on Stretch, you could add my OBS repo to use its gcc-4.9 for the build.

[Segfault]

FWIW I just upgraded to Firefox-55, no PA, Gentoo box.

[kedaha]

Thanks, stevepusser for your informative reply and for the link to your repository source packages which I'll certainly use.
Meanwhile, I successfully built Palemoon Version 27.4.1 (64-bit) with gcc 4:6.3.0-4 following the instructions at Developer_Guide:Build_Instructions/Pale_Moon/Linux after cloning the GitHub repository.

I appended the following options, to those that are already there, to .mozconfig

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ac_add_options --disable-pulseaudio
ac_add_options --enable-oss

I finally tested the build by changing directory to /pmbuild/dist/palemoon/ and running the command:

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palemoon -no-remote -p

It worked apparently without Pulseaudio but there was no sound after a reboot after removing pulseaudio.
So I'll try apulse.
The only thing I don't like much about Palemoon is the license which isn't exactly DFSG-compliant but one mustn't complain too much.

Thanks Segfault; I wonder if Firefox-55 without PA will permit --disable-pulseaudio --enable-oss.
I'll look into it.

[stevepusser]

OK, let me know how stable that build turns out to be. The developers should be interested, too. There's some Arch users that are building it with newer gcc's, but I think they are passing some extra configuration to the mozconfig.

I get the source from by downloading the tar.gz tarball from the releases section of the github page: https://github.com/MoonchildProductions ... n/releases

You can make it so the build system sees it as a source tarball by just renaming it in the correct format, such as palemoon_27.4.1.orig.tar.gz, but I extract and repack the source as a tar.xz file to cut down on the bandwidth I have to use.

[Segfault]

There was GCC ABI change. I wouldn't build anything with 4.x. My system compiler is 7.1, actually.