Firefox 56.0 on Slackware64-14.2
 

Has anyone been able to successfully build firefox-56.0 on 14.2 (64bit)? I tried to give it a go. First, I was able to install rust with no issues. Where I'm running into a problem is that this version requires a newer llvm. I attempted to build llvm 5.0.0 which is the same version in -current, but it refused to build because it can't find readline.h. I built the readline version that is also in -current, but it didn't make a difference. I'm starting to think that 14.2 libraries may be a bit too old for this version of firefox. Any thoughts are welcomed! Thank you!

Does you have to compile it? Have you tried just repackaging the binaries that Mozilla offer?

As I long time Slackware user, I always try to compile it first. :) I know that I can use the provided binary version. I've been very impressed how much faster Firefox feels on my laptop running -current. Wanted to try it on my desktop running -stable. Compiling it may be out of the question.

You could try a symbolic link using the new library names pointing to the older libraries. There may not be anything in the new library that is really needed.

It's a pain in the arse, particularly because of the introduction of Stylo, Firefox's new CSS engine, which needs Rust (which brings its own set of problems).

Here's what you'll need to do:

• Build and install libedit - the SlackBuild and version in -current will suffice.
• If you want to use Stylo, Firefox won't compile with the version of LLVM in 14.2 (it needs to be 3.9 or newer - but don't use 5.0, see below for why). Build a new llvm package based on the SlackBuild in -current but use the 4.0.1 sources instead. clang.toolchains.i586.triple.diff.gz won't apply cleanly against 4.0.1, but this doesn't matter if you're building on an x86_64 system (and you pretty much have to if you're compiling Firefox). Upgrade the stock llvm package with this one.
• Build and install Rust 1.20.0 - the SlackBuild on SBo works fine. Rust currently doesn't compile with LLVM 5.0, which is why you have to use LLVM 4.0.1.
• Build mozilla-firefox using the SlackBuild in -current, but replace the source tarball with 56.0.1. Add "ac_add_options --enable-stylo" to the mozconfig if you want to build Stylo. PGO builds of Firefox 56 are broken on modern Linux systems by bug 1389436, and Stylo builds are broken on all Linux systems by bug 1384062. These have been fixed in time for Firefox 57, but the patches weren't backported to 56 for some reason (Mozilla doesn't care too much about whether Firefox compiles cleanly on anything other than their build bots, basically), so you'll also need to apply the patch from commit 8d9ae8c45dd0 on mozilla-central (and 97dae871389b if you want to do a PGO build).

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I was wondering what Stylo was. I'll try through work through this. Thank you again!

Upgrading to the new rust right now. We'll see if that fixes the build.

There's nothing in the 1.21.0 release notes about LLVM 5 compatibility (and issue 43370 is still open), so I doubt it'll work. Worth a try though, I suppose.

Pat, I've been meaning to talk to you about the mozilla-firefox and mozilla-thunderbird SlackBuilds for some time. I've rewritten them to keep them as close as possible to the way Mozilla builds official releases, to limit the likelihood of the SlackBuilds no longer working because Mozilla decided to change the build system yet again. Should I email them to you?

Sure, I'll take a look. Thanks!

You were correct, it did not work. But it doesn't make anything worse as far as I can tell, and hopefully this will be fixed up for Firefox 57. So we'll take the rust upgrade anyway.

Thank you for looking into this Pat. So, for those who want to try and build Firefox in the stable branch, we need to wait until version 57 comes out? I still need to upgrade llvm to version 4 at least, correct?

Never mind. I re-read what CTM wrote again. Just got confused.

So, I finally had some time to explore this. Since I was going to go through this whole process regardless, I went ahead and built the latest beta version of 57. Wow, I'm liking where Firefox is headed. Felt very snappy (no hard numbers) compared to the ESR version. Huge improvement!

Any way to FORCE FF 56 to use GTK2 themes?

unfortunately not, upstream has dropped support for gtk+2 from version 53.x.