Re: Open Source does mean easily re-compile-able

On Sun, 12/29/2024 4:54 AM, Muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:

On Sat, 28 Dec 2024 23:32:37 -0000 (UTC)
kalevi@kolttonen.fi (Kalevi Kolttonen) gabbled:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sat, 28 Dec 2024 19:40:46 +0100, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
>

You think it's normal that on a Linux installation where, say, no 'cc'
(as prominent example of a development tool) is installed the package
manager would first install ALL the necessary compilers and scripting
languages just to create a binary (as opposed to just installing the
binary)?

>
The discussion has to do with creating your own version of the binary,
rather than using the repo-provided version.

>
Right.
>
Anyway, to be honest, I never realized how bloated Thunderbird is.
The source RPM thunderbird-128.5.2-1.fc41.src.rpm is 690MB and
the main source directory unpacked is:
>
~/tmp/tb/thunderbird-128.5.2 $ du -sh
4.2G    .

 
Welcome to Lego brick style programming where the main application devs are
incompetant halfwits unable to implement even simple things themselves beyond
designing (if that applies to Thunderbird) a GUI so have to import 101 libraries
to do everything for them.
 
I've written my own newsreader system and while admittedly its command line
only it requires only one 3rd party library which is OpenSSL.

You know that Thunderbird uses the source code of Firefox,
to build XUL.so , which is the rendering engine for the interface.

Thunderbird is the demo app for XUL. It's not really
a product, it was partially a creation which was
intended to show how XUL could provide a web render
engine for another software package.

As a result, a relatively small amount of code, implements
News and Email functions. At least 90% of the vast volume
of files in the tarball, is a copy of the Firefox source.

The Thunderbird build tree, even has an option to "just build Firefox".
This is a means of proving the Firefox portion of the tree was
not damaged by staff during tree preparation.

The Thunderbird program, tries to restrict just exactly
how much of Firefox is used for "browsing". If there is a
URL in an email message, Thunderbird would prefer to call
the platform browser (whatever it is) to handle the URL.
But if the Thunderbird staff want to put up an appeal for
donations, using a Mozilla-hosted web page, that part uses
the Firefox code inside Thunderbird, for rendering. This is a
security consideration, an analysis and action on the attack
surface available. Notice that Thunderbird does not do
"Quantum" the way Firefox does, so it doesn't have exactly
the same security precautions. And that's because the
browser portion, is not really intended for "general browsing".

The Thunderbird GUI is a three-pane view. If the render engine
fails, the pane view turns yellow and there is a reference
on the screen "to an XML file". It is that XML file, which
draws the three pane view and populates it with decorations.
When you see that yellow failure condition, that's your
chance to verify exactly how the product works. The graphics
are not drawn with Athena widgets. The graphics are a demo
of what the XUL shared library can do for you.

Is the whole thing obscene ? Yes. You won't find too many
software creations, this distorted. Still, people are using it.
Most people are not aware what is under the hood. It's
a herd of elephants :-)

   Paul