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

gazelle@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) writes:

Kalevi Kolttonen <kalevi@kolttonen.fi> wrote:
...

Thunderbird is open source, maybe even free software.
>
I am sure it is extremely easy to either remove the
"reply" button or to bind it to the "followup" function.

>
I doubt it is any simple matter to find it in the massive source code,
much less to figure out how to fix it, much less figure out how to
successfully re-build (and test!) it after making your changes.
>
Generally, most complicated GUI software, even if technically Open
Source, is difficult, if not impossible, for ordinary people using
ordinary machines, to re-build from source.  Among other things, you
will generally end up spending many hours, if not days, getting all
the dependencies installed.

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

So I don’t think the need to install build dependencies is likely to be
a real obstacle to rebuilding Thunderbird.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/