Need Help compiling new Firefox with --enable-alsa
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The --enable-alsa parameter was removed in ff 54. It's pulseaudio or no-audio whether we like it or not. If you still want alsa, stick to firefox-esr.
And the worst thing is it was not written in any changelog! Here is a bug report from arch, where the maintainer states that he built ff with --enable-alsa until until ff 54. https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/53195#comment155941
Thank you Ztcoracat, I will check that out. Thank you also, jim p but i don't think that's quite accurate. The ALSA support code is still in there, just disabled, or more accurately "deferred", by default. There is now a github selection possible for both v56 and v57 with ALSA enabled and Pulse disabled. Even though it is github I rarely just blindly install what amounts to a blob like that on my main so I have tried it on a secondary box and other than renaming Firefox to Nightly (easily altered in about:config but not needed) so far no issues and it definitely works with just ALSA. You can check it out here ====>>>>
though I'd still prefer to compile my own so I will continue to work on this. With all the growing disdain for ALSA but with no workable alternative (Pulseaudio can't do ALSA's job, just direct it) something has to give. Nature abhors a vacuum, right?
I hate to fallback on "the shotgun method" but that's what I had to do for the gconf dependency problem. I just upgraded to Buster and installed almost everything gconf, and replaced "pkg-config" with "pkgconf" and got past that obstacle. There were several more but they responded with just an install or two until finally ./configure completed without error.
Make is taking awhile. I'm typing this while it chugs along. I don't want to replace Firefox-ESR just yet as I want a fallback so I am yet undecided how to install it. In Slackware, at least with the blobs, I just untar them and copy to "/usr/lib64/firefox-version" and then create symlinks. I may try that after "make" as i don't want to "make install" and find myself unable to remove it it is unsatisfactory and I don't want to create a .deb package for fear it will replace ESR, so I'm still just following my nose and trying to be safe. I'll report back for any interested in rolling their own FF with ALSA support.
UPDATE: make failed with this error
Code:
recipe for target 'force-cargo-library-build' failed
make[3]: *** [force-cargo-library-build] Error 101
so now I need to research why that failed and if forcing cargo is required or mot.
DEBUG: configure: error: * * * Could not find gconf-2.0
ERROR: old-configure failed
One thing that jumped out at me, was that you did not seem to have libgconf2-dev installed. It's missing dev files which will usually generate these compiler errors rather than missing binary packages.
You can also disable gconf support via the mozconfig
//edit: Last error seems more like a compiler problem. You may need to build a newer rust... good luck...
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