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This is IMO one of the under-celebrated benefits of Linux distros. You should be able to (e.g.) sudo apt-get build-dep firefox; apt-get source firefox; cd firef

by geofft 7y ago

This is IMO one of the under-celebrated benefits of Linux distros. You should be able to (e.g.) sudo apt-get build-dep firefox; apt-get source firefox; cd firefox[TAB]; debuild and have yourself a working package. Whatever dependencies it needs are all installed in a standardized way.

panpanna 7y ago
You should not forgive dependency bloat just because Linux makes it a bit easier to handle.
- jerf 7y ago
  I'm not sure that's an applicable term here. I see "dependency bloat" as an application having a lot of unnecessary dependencies, like when I start a basic project skeleton in Hot Javascript Framework of the Week and get 1,000 dependencies loaded in (which, in npm land, is a conservative number; I felt bad about saying 10,000 but from what I've seen it isn't necessarily far off the mark). But when you have a project that really does touch every XWindows library there is, and really does need to know about every major image format, and really does speak every major network protocol, and runs a full JIT interpreter and compiler, and integrates with every OS security mechanism there is, and uses every build protection library it can find, and on and on... well, better those dependencies than re-implementation of all that from scratch. Fortunately, there aren't very many things nowadays other than a browser that has that characteristic. (Office suites, maybe. QT and other similar things considered as a whole, but not necessarily what any given user of QT will need.)
  - panpanna 7y ago
    I was indeed thinking of npm when I wrote that comment but we are starting to see similar problems in some large rust projects. It's simply too easy to add a new dependency. Anyway, some poster child FOSS projects in C++ take hours to compile due to dependency bloat.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  Which FF dependencies do you think are unnecessary?
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  And the alternative to depending on those codebases is.....? Write your own? Don't build out the feature? What, exactly do you propose?
  - est31 7y ago
    Sometimes you depend on stuff you don't even use. Or your dependency depends on it. Or the stuff only gives you little advantages. E.g. in Rust the failure crate saves you maybe 10 lines of code or such. But it has tons of dependencies. Or the lalrpop library crate depends on things only the binary crate needs because both are named the same way. You end up downloading and building things you don't even need. This stuff is fixable, the problem is that people don't care much about it.
NilsIRL 7y ago
Nix aims to fix this. https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/
secure 7y ago
On Debian (and derivatives), check out https://github.com/Debian/pk4 https://github.com/Debian/pk4 for this purpose!
- geofft 7y ago
  Wow, hadn't seen that before, thanks!
BeetleB 7y ago
Not 100% sure I follow you, but isn't that what Gentoo provides? I can easily tell Portage to fetch the sources. If I want to make a change, I create a patch with my changes, and put it in the patches directory where the Firefox ebuilds live. I don't even think you have to edit the ebuild to add a patch - just name the patch properly and drop it in the right place.
- geofft 7y ago
  Yes, basically any Linux distro or equivalent product (like Homebrew) provides this. I'm drawing a distinction between having a distro and putting the pieces together yourself, not between any two distros. (I'm mostly familiar with Debian but I think it is just about as easy everywhere.)

by geofft 7y ago

panpanna 7y ago

You should not forgive dependency bloat just because Linux makes it a bit easier to handle.

jerf 7y ago
I'm not sure that's an applicable term here. I see "dependency bloat" as an application having a lot of unnecessary dependencies, like when I start a basic project skeleton in Hot Javascript Framework of the Week and get 1,000 dependencies loaded in (which, in npm land, is a conservative number; I felt bad about saying 10,000 but from what I've seen it isn't necessarily far off the mark). But when you have a project that really does touch every XWindows library there is, and really does need to know about every major image format, and really does speak every major network protocol, and runs a full JIT interpreter and compiler, and integrates with every OS security mechanism there is, and uses every build protection library it can find, and on and on... well, better those dependencies than re-implementation of all that from scratch. Fortunately, there aren't very many things nowadays other than a browser that has that characteristic. (Office suites, maybe. QT and other similar things considered as a whole, but not necessarily what any given user of QT will need.)
- panpanna 7y ago
  I was indeed thinking of npm when I wrote that comment but we are starting to see similar problems in some large rust projects. It's simply too easy to add a new dependency. Anyway, some poster child FOSS projects in C++ take hours to compile due to dependency bloat.
EpicEng 7y ago
Which FF dependencies do you think are unnecessary?
spookthesunset 7y ago
And the alternative to depending on those codebases is.....? Write your own? Don't build out the feature? What, exactly do you propose?
- est31 7y ago
  Sometimes you depend on stuff you don't even use. Or your dependency depends on it. Or the stuff only gives you little advantages. E.g. in Rust the failure crate saves you maybe 10 lines of code or such. But it has tons of dependencies. Or the lalrpop library crate depends on things only the binary crate needs because both are named the same way. You end up downloading and building things you don't even need. This stuff is fixable, the problem is that people don't care much about it.

NilsIRL 7y ago

Nix aims to fix this. https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/

secure 7y ago

On Debian (and derivatives), check out https://github.com/Debian/pk4 https://github.com/Debian/pk4 for this purpose!

geofft 7y ago
Wow, hadn't seen that before, thanks!

BeetleB 7y ago

Not 100% sure I follow you, but isn't that what Gentoo provides? I can easily tell Portage to fetch the sources. If I want to make a change, I create a patch with my changes, and put it in the patches directory where the Firefox ebuilds live. I don't even think you have to edit the ebuild to add a patch - just name the patch properly and drop it in the right place.

geofft 7y ago
Yes, basically any Linux distro or equivalent product (like Homebrew) provides this. I'm drawing a distinction between having a distro and putting the pieces together yourself, not between any two distros. (I'm mostly familiar with Debian but I think it is just about as easy everywhere.)