Re: IceCat-68.2.0-guix0-preview2 now available via GNU Guix

[Mike Gerwitz]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 16:47:26 -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> Although the IceCat project has not yet released IceCat-68, for the
> benefit of those who are impatient to update their IceCat (e.g. due to
> security flaws recently publicized by Mozilla which affect IceCat-60), I
> wanted to let you all know that the GNU Guix project now provides a
> preliminary preview version of IceCat-68.

You've done excellent work, Mark, thank you.

> For now, to generate a source tarball for this preview version, you'll
> need to install Guix, update it using "guix pull", and then run:
>
>   guix build --source icecat
>
> The resulting source tarball should, in theory, work on any system that
> IceCat supports, not just Guix (although Android support is completely
> untested so far, and might very well be broken at present).
>
> More precisely, the command above tries to emulate what the IceCat
> maintainers would normally do themselves to produce an official source
> tarball, except that Guix does it *deterministically*, such that
> precisely the same bit pattern should be produced every time.  Toward
> that end, the timestamps and file ordering in the tarball are different
> from what would be found in an official IceCat source tarball, the l10n
> files are downloaded from fixed upstream revisions instead of grabbing
> the latest at the time 'makeicecat' is run, and the included manifests
> may be sorted differently.  Those are the only differences I found the
> last time I checked.
>
> If there are any courageous souls who would like to try generating the
> source tarball using Guix and building it on their preferred OS, I would
> be grateful to hear about your experiences, positive or negative.

My hope is to use Guix to produce the distribution tarballs for IceCat
going forward (as Mark showed above).  I have done some preliminary
testing building with the Guix-generated tarball using a foreign distro.

If others could try building using the tarball created by Guix, please
let us know here if you experience any problems.

We won't be publishing tarballs to alpha.gnu.org just yet, since there's
still more work to do first.

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker+Activist | GNU Maintainer & Volunteer
GPG: D6E9 B930 028A 6C38 F43B  2388 FEF6 3574 5E6F 6D05
https://mikegerwitz.com

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