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A comment on OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR. Parent comment

Re:OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR by djsumdog on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:24AM (#22025012)
Is that what's going on? I wonder how the Gentoo maintainers are dealing. They frequently unbundle libraries, but I've also see a lot of packages with use flags like system-jpeg or system-sdl to force the ebuild to use a system library instead of the built in.

Firefox, Libreoffice and others big applications typically take a long time to compile because they have so much stuff built-in instead of depending on the system libs. They gain a lot of stability and predictability but you can have dependent libs with security issues too.

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Re:OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR by joecool1029 on Sunday January 12, 2020 @03:27AM (#22025185)
> I wonder how the Gentoo maintainers are dealing.

I spoke to the gentoo firefox package maintainer last night. He even has firefox building on aarch64 with musl, so things are pretty good. For more common targets, there's also the option of using the official binaries from Mozilla.

Gentoo policy is to attempt to provide a way to use system libraries where possible except when those libraries are too heavily modified. If something breaks, they use the bundled package. You can see that's currently happening with harfbuzz in firefox until they bringup the patch: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/blob/master/www-client/fire...

From experience, it's usually fine to use system libs when available unless those system libs are unstable or development releases. Then all bets are off.

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