Wolfgang’s blog

Firefox 3 has been finally released today from the Mozilla Corporation!
That also means that adopted RPM packages are provided for the openSUSE users through the mozilla buildservice repository.
Subscribers of that repository will get the final Firefox 3 package when running a package update on distributions where it is actually supported. (openSUSE 10.2 and above).
Firefox 2.x is and will still be available for older distributions in that repo.
In addition a new RPM package called firefox2 is now available in the mozilla:legacy repository for people who want to have Firefox 2.x explicitely. We’ll keep that maintained as long as possible.
Preparing the full official online update for openSUSE 11.0 is on its way as well.

Since I saw some comments/requests during openSUSE 11.0’s beta phase that Firefox is still at 3.0b5 level even as Firefox 3.0rc1 is already out I want to give a short comment on what the plans are.
In openSUSE’s roadmap there was a freeze for packages containing cryptographic algorithms at April 7th. At that point Firefox 3.0b5 was current and so it’s not allowed to make cryptographic changes after that date. As Firefox depends heavily on Mozilla’s NSS which holds these algorithms we have to keep them in sync to be sure everything works.
When openSUSE 11.0 gets finally released there will be an online update to the latest Firefox package.
If you want to test what actually will end up in that package you can subscribe to the buildservice repository mozilla:beta and get the latest package there.
You are welcome to report issues with that in Novell bugzilla’s Firefox component mentioning that you use the buildservice package.

Mozilla.org just released Firefox 3.0b4 developer preview and so you obviously can find the latest packages in mozilla:beta as well.

If you don’t bother the risk running a beta version, please give them a try. We will also hopefully land the set of packages in Factory this week so that they should appear in openSUSE 11.0alpha3 for broader testing. As always feel free to report issues you find either in Novell’s bugzilla or Mozilla’s if you know it’s a generic issue (like rendering issues for example).

Something I need to post probably is that the MozillaFirefox packages cannot be used in their 32bit flavour if you run a 64bit system. This is because MozillaFirefox depends on mozilla-xulrunner190 which depends on mozilla-nspr and mozilla-nss and none of them is available as baselibs package due to technical buildservice restrictions.

If you want to test Firefox 3 in 32bit on x86-64 systems you should be able to use the firefox package from the same repository. You need to remove “MozillaFirefox” and install “firefox” which should work for you since it contains everything built in.

Happy browsing!

Over the last days I was working on preparing and polishing a XULRunner 1.9 package for openSUSE. It’s now available in the mozilla:beta buildservice repository. Some news of interest for developers using Mozilla technologies can be found here.

(Just a sidenote on what I’ve read yesterday: “Not only will Firefox 3 be the first release of the popular browser to use XulRunner as its back end, but upcoming releases of GNOME-based distros such as Fedora and Ubuntu are expected to install XulRunner by default as well”. I can only say that openSUSE is shipping, installing and actually using XULRunner since version 10.1)

Just a few minutes ago I also finished the first step in redesigning the Firefox 3.0b3 package I’ve been providing in the same repository. You’ll find that it is much smaller (the base package is < 1MB) as it's based on the XULRunner infrastructure now. That is quite a massive change and I don't know yet if it works well. Nevertheless I decided to publish that package so that people subscribed to the repo will get it when they update their packages.
We need broad testing of that package since it is planned to ship that way in openSUSE 11.0. So everyone please report bugs you encounter when switching to that (preferably in Bugzilla).

I just committed Firefox 3.0b2 to the buildservice and it will show up for download during the day. (The buildservice is currently loaded with a Factory update so it might take several hours :-().
It’s still for testing purposes only! (While I haven’t seen any feedback about b1 yet and this post has been created using Beta2).

Another thing people might be interested in is that this version and also Firefox 2.0.0.11 from the buildservice repository contain a searchplugin for openSUSE software search. Just choose it in the search box.

Firefox 3.0b1 has been released last week from the Mozilla Corporation and yesterday followed the first experimental package for openSUSE. It’s available from the buildservice’s mozilla:beta repository and its version is 2.9.91 because of RPM’s version number interpretation if you wonder. Note that that release (and its RPM package) is for testing purposes only. Backing up your firefox profile in ~/.mozilla/firefox is highly recommended before trying that version.

Another sidenote: Mozilla applications are currently not really working with the gcc 4.3 release in Factory because of optimization issues.

Recently I stumbled across the request from S-Trust for inclusion of their CA certificates into the Mozilla root certificate database.
Usually I would consider this a good thing since S-Trust provides “qualified signatures” on bank cards from the German Savings Banks and so I looked at their website to see if it would be an idea to order such a signature.

What I’ve found is pretty annoying:

The software (ZKA-Sig-API) which is needed to download the certificate to the chipcard is only available for Windows.

I couldn’t find any useful information on how to use the chipcard together with Firefox or Thunderbird so my guess is that one would need a PKCS11 module integrated in the application which is only available in their Sign-it software which is … only available for Windows.

That and this sentence from the comment
in above bug: “All German citizen are able to get one of these signature cards.” really annoy me.

Yes, you are right. I’m a bad blogger since my last post was again some time ago

As some people might already know I left SUSE end of september and took another position. (I won’t tell you the name of the company since nobody would know it anyway.) But expect that I’ll still be, as much as possible, involved in the openSUSE project. I also started to maintain some mozilla packages in the openSUSE buildservice. (Yes, I know that Firefox 2pre is still missing there). Please note that I’m not sure what will happen with the repository on ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/mozilla since this area was maintained by me just for fun.

This week I started my new work in the Netherlands, though I will work from home in the end. I can’t tell you much at this point since some stuff is a little bit secret but this will change soon AFAIK.

As CODE10 bugfix mode is almost over now I want to give a short overview what’s coming on the Mozilla front in SUSE Linux 10.2 timeframe with focus on the “Mozilla platform” aka XULRunner aka GeckoRuntimeEnvironment (GRE) and so on.

So the first thing to mention is that the Gecko roadmap states that Gecko 1.9 will not be ready within our deadline and therefore we can expect to have Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2 and SeaMonkey 1.1 in the SUSE Linux 10.2 release. It also means that we won’t have XULRunner 1.9 but a 1.8.1 release. That’s important to know and I’ll come back to this later.

With SUSE Linux 10.1 (and all other CODE10 products) we are shipping the packages mozilla-xulrunner and its development subpackage gecko-sdk in versions 1.8.0.x. This has changed already in FACTORY (which is our moving development tree) and now there are the following packages:

• mozilla-xulrunner180 (replaces mozilla-xulrunner)
• mozilla-xulrunner180-l10n (new subpackage containing toolkit localizations other than en-US)
• mozilla-xulrunner180-devel (replaces gecko-sdk)

The naming change and some other changes within the package were made to make it possible to have different versions of XULRunner installed on one system. As you can see there is still only one version allowed from a major Gecko release. So the next packages which will appear on FACTORY are mozilla-xulrunner181 etc. and some time in the future (if versioning scheme doesn’t change) mozilla-xulrunner190. There are also changes to adopt the structure and naming scheme according to Ben’s (XULRunner project lead) proposal which is primarily meant for version 1.9 and I don’t want to change the filesystem locations for the 1.8.0.x versions to keep it as compatible as possible with our released package. The upcoming 1.8.1.x package will most probably still follow the same directory structure. (Please note that I still have to figure out some details to make minor version upgrades possible without breaking applications embedding libgtkembedmoz.so using rpath or environment tricks.)

Coming back to the consequence of the unavailability of XULRunner 1.9 in 10.2 timeframe.

In short: Nothing will change

Long description:

Applications using libgtkembedmoz.so will still have to use workarounds to be able to find the correct version of the library. (see Novell bug 184911) In most cases this workaround is using rpath. Please see what’s coming with XULRunner 1.9 in the future. Every application using gtkmozembed should use this linking strategy when XULRunner 1.9 is finally there.

hmm, first a Happy new year to everyone (it really was a long time ago as I wrote my last post here :-()

In the meantime I’ve evaluated if I can visit FOSDEM this year. Unfortunately this seems to be not possible. Have I ever wrote about the disadvantages you see when you work officially in a non-development department and try to get budget for a travel to a developer conference? This is really frustrating!

Some good news: SUSE Linux 10.1 will (most probably) contain SeaMonkey 1.0 as replacement for Mozilla (the suite) in addition to Firefox. (Yes, I’m still using the suite in some places.)