Re: text-to-speech in firefox (Re: firefox-116)

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------- Original Message -------
On Saturday, August 5th, 2023 at 2:08 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:

> I adjusted the title to describe what the message is about

That's fine, thanks. I did realize that the title was not the best after posting.

> > -dotconf-1.3
> > -espeak-1.48.04nb5
> > -flac-1.4.3
> > -libao-1.2.2
> > -libao-sun-1.2.2nb2
> > -libltdl-2.4.7
> > -libsndfile-1.2.0nb2
> > -mpg123-1.31.3
> > -speech-dispatcher-0.10.2nb7
> 
> 
> FWIW, the set of these that were not already on my desktop built in 12
> minutes (and my box is really old), compared to much longer for firefox
> itself.

Yes, true.

> As far as I can tell these are all Free Software and not offensive.

Also true but, that's not the point, it's about choice.

> > Shouldn't/couldn't this be a build option for those who would actually want to have TTS (text-to-speech)?
> > Or, is thin enforced by Mozilla and can not be disabled?
> 
> I don't see why you are jumping to conclusions that this should be
> optioned.

Because I don't need it and didn't ask for it. It's not about the dependencies.
It's about Mozilla thinking it knows what users want or, not.

> Also, options don't play well with binary packages. The default
> controls what binary packages do, and there the build cost is less of a
> concern. 

I no longer use binary packages, I've running HEAD for over two years and there are no binaries.
Another reason for building everything locally, is that there are other packages where the defaults don't suite my taste.

> But the way your phrased it ("actually want", which implies
> that reasonable people would not want), it sounds like you think it
> should be default off.

Nope, default ON is fine, as long as I can have it OFF.

> Without knowing what's going on, TTS seems like a useful feature,
> especially for those with vision impairment, and if firefox in general
> has this, it seems that the default pkgsrc build should too. So if it
> were an option, it would be on.

Agreed. It can be very useful for many people and it should be default ON.

> It's a little hard to tell what the total change in dependency footprint
> is, but a quick look makes me think it's fairly minor, especially if one
> considers build tools.

It's about choice, not the amount of dependencies or, it's footprint.
I have more than enough disk space.

> Overall my impression is that the basic issue is that firefox is not for
> you :)

That's also correct :)
Unfortunately, there is no choice. I've tried for a year or so and came back to it.
We don't have chromium and even if we did, I wouldn't use it.
Firefox is the best of two evils.

> It's large and fairly bloated, requires large and memory-piggy
> tools to build

If you mean Rust, that doesn't bother me. Rust is one of the first things I build on a new set-up anyway.

> and tends to do things itself rather than rely on system
> mechanisms. I see on one side deciding to be ok with that and on the
> other deciding not to run it.

True, if I had an alternative I would drop it.
But, I've used BadWolf and Lariza for a year and unfortunately, webkit based browsers put too much load on the cpu.

Regards.