Seamonkey-2.53.17.1

Introduction to Seamonkey

Seamonkey is a browser suite, a descendant of Netscape. It includes the browser, composer, mail and news clients, and an IRC client.

It is the community-driven follow-on to the Mozilla Application Suite, created after Mozilla decided to focus on separate applications for browsing and e-mail. Those applications are Firefox-115.5.0 and Thunderbird-115.5.1.

[Note]

Note

Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.

Package Information

Additional Downloads

[Note]

Note

The tarball seamonkey-2.53.17.1.source.tar.xz will untar to seamonkey-2.53.17.1 directory.

Seamonkey Dependencies

Required

Cbindgen-0.26.0, GTK+-3.24.38, nodejs-20.10.0, six-1.16.0, UnZip-6.0, yasm-1.3.0, and Zip-3.0

Recommended

[Note]

Note

If you don't install recommended dependencies, then internal copies of those packages will be used. They might be tested to work, but they can be out of date or contain security holes.

Optional

alsa-lib-1.2.10, dbus-glib-0.112, startup-notification-0.12, Valgrind-3.22.0, Wget-1.21.4, Wireless Tools-29, Hunspell, and Watchman

Editor Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/seamonkey

Installation of Seamonkey

The configuration of Seamonkey is accomplished by creating a mozconfig file containing the desired configuration options. A default mozconfig file is created below. To see the entire list of available configuration options (and an abbreviated description of each one), issue ./configure --help. You may also wish to review the entire file and uncomment any other desired options. Create the file by issuing the following command:

cat > mozconfig << "EOF"
# If you have a multicore machine, all cores will be used

# If you have installed DBus-Glib comment out this line:
ac_add_options --disable-dbus

# If you have installed dbus-glib, and you have installed (or will install)
# wireless-tools, and you wish to use geolocation web services, comment out
# this line
ac_add_options --disable-necko-wifi

# Uncomment these lines if you have installed optional dependencies:
#ac_add_options --enable-system-hunspell
#ac_add_options --enable-startup-notification

# Uncomment the following option if you have not installed PulseAudio
#ac_add_options --disable-pulseaudio
# and uncomment this if you installed alsa-lib instead of PulseAudio
#ac_add_options --enable-alsa

# Comment out following options if you have not installed
# recommended dependencies:
ac_add_options --with-system-icu
ac_add_options --with-system-libevent
ac_add_options --with-system-nspr
ac_add_options --with-system-nss
ac_add_options --with-system-webp

# Disabling debug symbols makes the build much smaller and a little
# faster. Comment this if you need to run a debugger. Note: This is
# required for compilation on i686.
ac_add_options --disable-debug-symbols

# The elf-hack is reported to cause failed installs (after successful builds)
# on some machines. It is supposed to improve startup time and it shrinks
# libxul.so by a few MB.  With recent Binutils releases the linker already
# supports a much safer and generic way for this.
ac_add_options --disable-elf-hack
ac_add_options --enable-linker=bfd
export LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -Wl,-z,pack-relative-relocs"

# Seamonkey has some additional features that are not turned on by default,
# such as an IRC client, calendar, and DOM Inspector. The DOM Inspector
# aids with designing web pages. Comment these options if you do not
# desire these features.
ac_add_options --enable-calendar
ac_add_options --enable-dominspector
ac_add_options --enable-irc

# The BLFS editors recommend not changing anything below this line:
ac_add_options --prefix=/usr
ac_add_options --enable-application=comm/suite

ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter
ac_add_options --disable-updater
ac_add_options --disable-tests

# The Rust code for SIMD optimization is much more outdated than
# Firefox and Thunderbird, so it does not build with recent Rustc.
ac_add_options --disable-rust-simd

ac_add_options --enable-strip
ac_add_options --enable-install-strip

# You cannot distribute the binary if you do this.
ac_add_options --enable-official-branding

# The option to use system cairo was removed in 2.53.9.
ac_add_options --enable-system-ffi
ac_add_options --enable-system-pixman

ac_add_options --with-system-bz2
ac_add_options --with-system-jpeg
ac_add_options --with-system-png
ac_add_options --with-system-zlib

export CC=clang CXX=clang++
EOF
[Note]

Note

If you are compiling this package in chroot you must ensure that /dev/shm is mounted. If you do not do this, the Python configuration will fail with a traceback report referencing /usr/lib/pythonN.N/multiprocessing/synchronize.py. As the root user, run:

mountpoint -q /dev/shm || mount -t tmpfs devshm /dev/shm

First, apply a security patch that fixes some problems with Seamonkey's bundled version of libvpx:

patch -Np1 -i ../seamonkey-2.53.17.1-consolidated_fixes-1.patch

The building system ships several internal copies of the Python 3 module six.py and wheel packages for pip and setuptools modules. Theses shipped modules are too old to work well with Python 3.12 or later. Replace the shipped six.py copies with the symlinks to six-1.16.0 already installed on the system, link the updated pip wheel package shipped as a part of Python 3 in LFS into the building system, and build an updated setuptools wheel package. Then adapt the building system for the updated modules. We also need to rewrite the code based on the imp module removed in Python 3.12 and later using the importlib module:

(for i in $(find -name six.py); do
   ln -sfv /usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/six.py $i
   [ $? = 0 ] || exit $?
 done) &&

ln -sv /usr/lib/python3.12/ensurepip/_bundled/pip-*.whl \
       third_party/python/virtualenv/virtualenv_support &&

tar xf ../setuptools-68.2.2.tar.gz                             &&
pip3 wheel --no-build-isolation --no-deps --no-cache-dir       \
           $PWD/setuptools-68.2.2                              \
           -w third_party/python/virtualenv/virtualenv_support &&

sed '/ConfigParser/s/Safe//'                          \
    -i testing/mozbase/mozprofile/mozprofile/prefs.py &&

sed 's/distutils/setuptools._&/'            \
    -i python/mozbuild/mozbuild/nodeutil.py &&

sed 's/readfp/read_file/' -i ipc/ipdl/ipdl.py &&

sed -e '/^import/s/imp$/importlib.util/'             \
    -e 's/imp.new_module/__import__/'                \
    -e "s/imp.load_source\(.*\)/spec =               \
        importlib.util.spec_from_file_location\1;    \
        mod = importlib.util.module_from_spec(spec); \
        spec.loader.exec_module(mod)/" -i python/mach/mach/main.py &&

sed -e '/^import/s/imp$/importlib.util/'                          \
    -e '/imp.PY_SOURCE/d'                                         \
    -e "s/\([a-z_]*\) = imp.load_module([^,]*,[^,]*,\(.*\)/spec = \
        importlib.util.spec_from_file_location('script', \2);     \
        \1 = importlib.util.module_from_spec(spec);               \
        spec.loader.exec_module(\1)/"                             \
    -i netwerk/dns/prepare_tlds.py                                \
       python/mozbuild/mozbuild/action/file_generate.py

If building with system ICU, adapt the line break mapping for ICU 74 or later:

(for i in {43..47}; do
   sed '/ZWJ/s/$/,CLASS_CHARACTER/' -i intl/lwbrk/LineBreaker.cpp || exit $?
 done)

Fix a problem with the bundled 'distro' python module:

sed -e '1012 s/stderr=devnull/stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL/' \
    -e '1013 s/OSError/(OSError, subprocess.CalledProcessError)/' \
    -i third_party/python/distro/distro.py

Compile Seamonkey by running the following commands:

AUTOCONF=true ./mach configure &&
./mach build

This package does not come with a test suite.

Install Seamonkey by issuing the following commands as the root user:

./mach install                  &&
chown -R 0:0 /usr/lib/seamonkey &&

cp -v $(find -name seamonkey.1 | head -n1) /usr/share/man/man1

Command Explanations

export CC=clang CXX=clang++: With the introduction of gcc-12, many more warnings are generated when compiling mozilla applications and that results in a much slower, and larger, build. Furthermore, building with GCC on i?86 is currently broken. Although upstream mozilla code defaults to using llvm unless overridden, the older configure code in Seamonkey defaults to gcc.

AUTOCONF=true ./mach configure: This validates the supplied dependencies and the mozconfig. The building system always checks for an old version (2.13) of autoconf, but it's not really needed because the necessary configure scripts are already shipped in the tarball and we've not modified the configure.in files. So we pass AUTOCONF=true so the building system will skip the checking for autoconf-2.13 and allow building this package without autoconf-2.13 installed.

./mach build --verbose: Use this alternative if you need details of which files are being compiled, together with any C or C++ flags being used. But do not add '--verbose' to the install command, it is not accepted there.

./mach build -jN: The build should, by default, use all the online CPU cores. If using all the cores causes the build to swap because you have insufficient memory, using fewer cores can be faster.

Configuring Seamonkey

For installing various Seamonkey add-ons, refer to Add-ons for Seamonkey.

Along with using the Preferences menu to configure Seamonkey's options and preferences to suit individual tastes, finer grain control of many options is only available using a tool not available from the general menu system. To access this tool, you'll need to open a browser window and enter about:config in the address bar. This will display a list of the configuration preferences and information related to each one. You can use the Search: bar to enter search criteria and narrow down the listed items. Changing a preference can be done using two methods. One, if the preference has a boolean value (True/False), simply double-click on the preference to toggle the value and two, for other preferences simply right-click on the desired line, choose Modify from the menu and change the value. Creating new preference items is accomplished in the same way, except choose New from the menu and provide the desired data into the fields when prompted.

If you use a desktop environment like Gnome or KDE you may wish to create a seamonkey.desktop file so that Seamonkey appears in the panel's menus. If you didn't enable Startup-Notification in your mozconfig change the StartupNotify line to false. As the root user:

mkdir -pv /usr/share/{applications,pixmaps}              &&

cat > /usr/share/applications/seamonkey.desktop << "EOF"
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=Seamonkey
Comment=The Mozilla Suite
Icon=seamonkey
Exec=seamonkey
Categories=Network;GTK;Application;Email;Browser;WebBrowser;News;
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
EOF

ln -sfv /usr/lib/seamonkey/chrome/icons/default/default128.png \
        /usr/share/pixmaps/seamonkey.png

Contents

Installed Programs: seamonkey
Installed Libraries: Numerous libraries, browser, and email/newsgroup components, plugins, extensions, and helper modules installed in /usr/lib/seamonkey
Installed Directory: /usr/lib/seamonkey

Short Descriptions

seamonkey

is the Mozilla browser/email/newsgroup/chat client suite