Re: 2024Q2: firefox-esr failing on NetBSD 10 i386

[Matthew Widup <widupmm%proton.me@localhost>]

On Sunday, July 14th, 2024 at 5:18 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:

> Wow, but an interesting data point. I am guessing you mean that these
> computers have CPUs that are i386 only and are not capable of running
> NetBSD/amd64, but have enough memory that it's possible to run firefox.
> If you meant something else please unconfuse me :-)
> 
> You may want to get one of them set up to be able to build packages and
> help with keeping things working. Many of the beastly package upstreams
> seem indifferent to portability concerns (e.g. they are willing to use
> rust), and also indifferent to continued use of 32-bit CPU types. So
> assumptions of LP64 creep in alongside linuxy type expectations, just
> like ILP32 assumptions used to be normal.
> 
> A lot of the people who work on pkgsrc have stopped trying to use 32-bit
> CPU types for desktop-type usage. For me, it is just extra work and
> pain for no good reason, as the oldest computer I want to use
> electricity to run is from 2006 and will run amd64. I don't mean to say
> others shouldn't work on this -- just that I've crossed it off my
> personal todo list.

Three of them (the only ones I would care to run Firefox on) are 2002 vintage Pentium 4 with 3Gb RAM, and plenty of swap.  One is set up so that I can build packages on it: all the packages that I use on these are built from pkgsrc.  I don't normally use binary packages on these.  Believe me, I'd like to do more to help out; but my time is extremely scarce.  So I typically don't do anything unless I absolutely need to.  These machines have specific purposes, and as long as they do what they do, I don't want to change them.

The other machines are considerably older, and likely nothing will get updated on them anyway.  Consider this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hbEZ3Mck0o&pp=ygURSUJNIFBDIHNlcnZlciA3MDQ%3D I could never get it to run NetBSD 6.