Are we moving to a *-bin distribution?

[t4bs]

I am in Funtoo because it's a source based distribution. Firefox and Thunderbird have not being updated for some time but the *-bin are.  Are we moving to a *-bin distribution? 

I am just trying to work out Funtoo's future direction and if that direction fits me.. 

Thanks

Trevor

[lego12239]

*  www-client/firefox
      Latest version available: 72.0.2
      Latest version installed: 72.0.2
      Size of files: 309,071 KiB
      Homepage:      https://www.mozilla.com/firefox
      Description:   Firefox Web Browser
      License:       MPL-2.0 GPL-2 LGPL-2.1

*  www-client/firefox-bin
      Latest version available: 78.0.2
      Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
      Size of files: 69,826 KiB
      Homepage:      https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
      Description:   Firefox Web Browser
      License:       MPL-2.0 GPL-2 LGPL-2.1

Oh. Really.

[AdiosKid]

The souced packages still there, just need more maintenance.

[nrc]

Once upon a time Funtoo just pointed to Gentoo packages.  Those tend to be very fresh but created a lot of breakage.  Now updates on most packages are curated to keep things more stable.  Community members are encouraged to provide pull requests to rev packages if they like.  

The cool new thing is autogen packages which can automatically generate a new ebuild for a release.  These are fairly easy and bulletproof for binary packages which is why some of those are fresher than the source packages.

[t4bs]

13 hours ago, lego12239 said:

*  www-client/firefox
      Latest version available: 72.0.2
      Latest version installed: 72.0.2
      Size of files: 309,071 KiB
      Homepage:      https://www.mozilla.com/firefox
      Description:   Firefox Web Browser
      License:       MPL-2.0 GPL-2 LGPL-2.1

*  www-client/firefox-bin
      Latest version available: 78.0.2
      Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
      Size of files: 69,826 KiB
      Homepage:      https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
      Description:   Firefox Web Browser
      License:       MPL-2.0 GPL-2 LGPL-2.1

Oh. Really.

Yes.   I am not here to argue.  I have been using Gentoo/Funtoo for nearly 20 years.  

I will put in a bug and see what happens

[lego12239]

 

[drobbins]

The situation with the -bin packages can best be explained this way.

For some browsers such as Chrome, we are getting security fixes from Google at the pace of at least once a week, sometimes more. Chrome is a big thing to compile over and over again. It is also some effort to keep the ebuild updated to deal with all upstream changes at this pace.

So a big part of this is based on the many releases we are getting from upstream projects that have a huge amount of source code.

For us, it is easy to auto-update these -bin packages using metatools (which happens automatically) than rush to manually re-tool and test an ebuild to build it all from sources (possibly with new dependencies that if we update them, will break other things on your system.)

This is not an ideological decision but a practical one. For now, for browsers in particular, this is by far the easiest way to "keep up" with all the churn upstream.

We support having from-source builds of Chrome, Firefox, etc. as well but these updated ebuilds do require some effort and testing. As always, PRs are welcome! (So, if our non-bin version is a bit older than the -bin, it just means no one has gotten around to doing the work to update it yet. But you can help with that ?

Best,

Daniel

[dutch-master]

5 hours ago, drobbins said:

For us, it is easy to auto-update these -bin packages using metatools (which happens automatically) than rush to manually re-tool and test an ebuild to build it all from sources (possibly with new dependencies that if we update them, will break other things on your system.)

Could a dedicated fork for -bin packages be an option? A bit like a "Debianized Funtoo", just -bin packages to install. Great way to get going on older hardware! Case in point: my CPU dates from 2012-ish and I'm not in a position to upgrade to a Ryzen system any time soon. Building libreoffice-bin takes up a lot less time then libreoffice, which is often newer then the -bin package, but libreoffice-bin doesn't always build successfully whereas libreoffice usually succeeds. Other big packages like mesa, ffmpeg etc also eat enormous amounts if install time to get a fairly basic working desktop. Having said that, installing a bare basic Funtoo system w/o any graphical environment (no X nor a DE) is pretty fast, usually in about 1 hr on my ancient hardware. (AMD A8-5600K APU, 32GB DDR3 RAM, GeForce 710 video card. Hey, I'm not a gamer, it works! ? )

 

Well, I s'pose it'll all come down to a effort vs impact analysis for you and the dev-team: how to get the best possible impact for the most amount of users in the least amount of time. I'd say you guys do a fine job on that ?

[drobbins]

Now that the Sabayon collaboration has been announced, yes, it does open up the possibility that Funtoo might provide binaries in the future. It is not a high priority at the moment but I could see this eventually being added to what Funtoo offers.