Re: Open Source does not mean easily re-compile-able

On Fri, 12/27/2024 11:14 AM, Kenny McCormack wrote:

In article <wwvh66p9ntv.fsf@LkoBDZeT.terraraq.uk>,
Richard Kettlewell  <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
...

On Debian-derived platforms, thats what apt-get build-dep is for.
Source package rebuild is also standardized.  It looks like the RH world
has something pretty similar.

 
I know all that - and, in theory, it should "just work".
 
But my experience is that theory and practice diverge.
 
Now, I may not be the most capable person in the world, probably not even
in the top 10 (or 100).  But that's exactly my point.  It's just not an
easy task for ordinary people under ordinary circumstances.
 

One of the solutions, is to not put email and USENET news, on the same tool.

I hit the reply by accident the other day here, and when I clicked
Send, a dialog whined about "Could not send because..." I have no email
account set up on the thing. Of course it cannot erroneously send
to email, because there is no email. The Reply button then is neutered.
I changed over to Followup, sent to newsgroup, and finished the job.

IDK about capable, but Thunderbird is a huge package, and the
installation may require Rust and some other materials to be
loaded. The description for building, may have started with
a Mercurial (Hg) clone, and then the build is based on that.
The tarball off the site, would be insufficient for an immediate
build. The recipe no longer describes starting with a tarball.

As a consequence, the distro people might not have a "conventional"
setup for Thunderbird. One of the distros, a .deb arrives from
Mozilla in a cardboard box. As a result of the package
being manufactured elsewhere, instead of in-house in the
Buildmeister corral, the source option just might be missing.

Still, even without doing the actual build, it would be fun
to tease the distro and see what it has to offer, and see whether
a patched source magically shows up. It would be good to know
whether in "difficult cases", it actually arrives ready to be
built for you.

For some of these "big" projects, a machine with 32GB of RAM
is recommended. Which helps with the linking phase. Some
of the compiling, the RAM footprint isn't all that large.
The procedure used to have a hideous linkage methodology
at one time, but that got modified a bit. To make a 32-bit
copy of the thing, it is best to build on a 64-bit OS!
If your distro isn't 64-bit, it would be not-possible to finish.

While a lot of distros are 64-bit only, you can *still* find 32-bit ones.
But not for much longer. Building Thunderbird on the one with
the arrow below, that could be a waste of your time. I don't know if
some PAE thing would work or not in 32-bit mode. I'm using a
mirror here, because the main site isn't as easy to get around on.

https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/linuxmint/debian/

lmde-6-cinnamon-32bit.iso    22-Sep-2023 17:07   2G   <===
lmde-6-cinnamon-64bit.iso    22-Sep-2023 16:26   3G
sha256sum.txt                01-Feb-2024 16:09   552
sha256sum.txt.gpg            01-Feb-2024 16:10   833

   Paul