Subject: Re: making firefox LP64 clean
To: Dieter <netbsd@sopwith.solgatos.com>
From: Michael Kukat <michael@bsdfans.org>
List: port-alpha
Date: 11/26/2004 06:19:53
Hi !

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Dieter wrote:
> The first question is:  is firefox the best hope for a usable
> web browser for NetBSD LP64 platforms (alpha/sparc64/amd64/mips)?
> (I'm currently using Netscape 4, and find more and more web sites
> are not ns4 friendly.  Complaints fall on deaf ears.)

Mozilla runs "fine" here on NetBSD/alpha 2.0RC4. But it's extremely sloooow
(besides the fact that if often crashes).

I would like to see FireFox on this platform, but for now i didn't grab in the
sources to try to fix it because - KDE 3.3 runs very well and brings konqueror,
which does not just run extremely stable but also is very fast and renders
nearly all pages correctly.

Netscape 4 is obsolete, slow, ugly. On some platforms here i tend to use links
-g via X-forward instead of NS4, as it's just more useable IMHO.

> I've compiled firefox-1.0 on alpha, and there are no shortage
> of compiler warnings.  Greping for warning in make.out yields
> 13990 lines.  (not counting those from gtk).

How many are pointer <> int conversions? *eg*

> I'm well aware that not all warnings are LP64 related, not
> all warnings mean actual bugs, and not all bugs have
> compiler warnings.  However, fixing warnings is a good place
> to start.

-Wall -Werror. But this will be a real lot of work...

> I can email diffs offlist to people willing to code review them
> and/or work on additional fixes.

Due to lack of time, and the fact that i'm currently grabbing into xscr to try
to improve some problems, i'm not able to help hunting the bugs, but if it
helps, i could test the result, if it helps. Do you use the pkgsrc firefox for
your efforts?

...Michael

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