Mozilla Firefox 116 Now Available - Capable Of Wayland-Only Builds

[-MacNuke-]

Avis was clear he was talking about server at first not Xorg as a whole. So in some ways you moved the goal post.

Well, the topic is that FireFox does not need X11 (not Xorg Server) dependencies anymore to be build. He then moved the topic to the Xorg server only but the topic is still "X11 dependencies" and Xorg delivers them. Sure, just saying Xorg may be misleading so I cleared it up later. But now Avis is still insisting that I mean Xorg server and Xorg server only.

Now what you are talking about is a little openssh optional dependancy called xauth

I did not talk about OpenSSH.

[oiaohm]

Unless you build your own package, the package dependencies of the distribution are what an end-user experiences, not what upstream would support.

But there is a difference and its important. What package do you need to rebuild and what party causes the problem.

It seems like our misunderstanding between you and me comes down to what you and me understood under a "hard dependency". You seem to mean it as "upstream requires it", whereas I mean "a non-optional dependency when the user installs the package", irrespective if it is required by upstream or the distribution.

Not exactly.

Problem is what has the hard dependency when installing Qbittorrent on debian its not Qbittorrent with the "hard dependency" on X11. Its the libqt6gui6 due to how it packaged that has the "hard dependency" on X11.

Lets say you just rebuilt ligqt6gui6 without the X11 dependency(want you can do if you download the source and alter the configuration slightly) the Qbittorrent package would now install without issue. This is not a totally hard dependency this is a distribution packaging issue causing unwanted dependency due to how 1 package is built. This kind of issue existed before Wayland and has existed as long as we have had distributions all the way back to slackware and the first Linux distribution.

qbittorrent one is a distribution packaging issue. If you want to install qbitorrent without installing anything from x.org this need to be brought up with your distribution maintainers of the graphical part of the qt libraries to fix how their stuff is packaged.

CUDA is a hard application level dependency distributions altering their packaging cannot fix this one and user rebuilding a package cannot fix this one the party that has to fix this one is Nvidia.

[andyprough]

Yes, there are ways around it sometimes. For openssh, you can use --no-install-recommends, for qbittorrent you can use "-nox" packages from unoffical sources. I only said that when you want a headless setup you don't want to pull in x11 even though many packages want to. Unless you've taken some extra or even unsupported steps, and that is annoying.

Yes, so annoying that you would cheer on any effort to remove choices from others just so you can avoid a --no-install-recommends or a -nox as part of one of your commands once in a blue moon.

You've made your point.

[ultimA]

Yes, so annoying that you would cheer on any effort to remove choices from others just so you can avoid a --no-install-recommends or a -nox as part of one of your commands once in a blue moon.

You've made your point.

Congratulations, you've managed to provide an absolutely wrong summary. The advantage of being able to build FF without X-support is not so that I can avoid an occasional --no-install-recommends. You didn't understand anything at all.

Also, again this nonsensical accusation of somebody wanting to remove choices or freedom. No. Nobody is advocating removing choices, and in particular, nobody is wanting to drop support for the X-server in apps like FF. When we say we like that FF can now be built without X-support is because it opens up the possibility to create new packages that can be wayland-only, in addition to the already existing packages, not instead of them. This is adding choices, not removing them.

[ultimA]

I sooo regret mentioning the whole headless thing and related stuff. It was just meant to be another example of a use-case where you might want to keep x-related code off your machine, in addition to the use-case of wanting a pure wayland system (obviously not both use-cases at the same time). *-nox and --no-install-recommends and co. were mentioned to make it clear that sometimes there are ways to avoid the libs getting installed. The whole point though was that with FF there were no way for that up until now.
Is this really so hard to comprehend?

[andyprough]

I sooo regret mentioning the whole headless thing and related stuff

I thought it led to a good discussion. I come at it from a different angle - my 25 years of using GNU/Linux has been marked by the major distros and major projects saying "you can't use KDE 3 anymore" even when KDE 4 was highly problematic; "you can't use Gnome 2 anymore" even when Gnome 3 was highly problematic; "you can't use those Gnome extensions anymore"; "you can't use a browser with an XUL engine anymore"; "use this network manager, no this one, no this one, no this one"; "you can't use your init scripts anymore"; "use this sound system, no this one, no this one"; "you can't use any of your 32-bit software anymore", etc etc etc

I've never been on the bleeding edge of anything, I'm way back in the back, trying to run an ethical business using freely licensed software, usually on 5-10 year old hardware. But it's been constant disruption, and often the new replacement software is worse in many ways than the software it's replacing.

Anyway, as I say, good discussion - lots of people with lots of different motivations view these upcoming Wayland/Xorg changes from different perspectives.

[oiaohm]

I thought it led to a good discussion. I come at it from a different angle - my 25 years of using GNU/Linux has been marked by the major distros and major projects saying "you can't use KDE 3 anymore" even when KDE 4 was highly problematic; "you can't use Gnome 2 anymore" even when Gnome 3 was highly problematic; "you can't use those Gnome extensions anymore"; "you can't use a browser with an XUL engine anymore"; "use this network manager, no this one, no this one, no this one"; "you can't use your init scripts anymore"; "use this sound system, no this one, no this one"; "you can't use any of your 32-bit software anymore", etc etc etc.

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Things are more complex. KDE 3 for example is still kept alive by some developers in trinity. The simple point is there is not unlimited developer time.

I've never been on the bleeding edge of anything, I'm way back in the back, trying to run an ethical business using freely licensed software, usually on 5-10 year old hardware. But it's been constant disruption, and often the new replacement software is worse in many ways than the software it's replacing.

Lets be real here you are paying nothing for the software right and you are not funding anyone to-do development. I have used Linux longer than you.

Over those 25 years you should have seen the time of KDE applications needing artsd audio and Gnome applications needing esound audio yes the 2000s the time of total audio hell where each desktop decide to write their own sound servers

Before you have cannot use X stuff happening you have the totally failed survival of the fittest logic that nothing had to be compatible with anything else on Linux. Yes this is how we end up with sysvinit being default on most distributions for a long time with per distributions tweaks making it somewhat work.

That use this sound system is better than early 2000 pick your desktop this sets your sound server and block audio from any application not made for this distribution.

Why did gnome and kde applications commonly start with G and K that right so user to tell what environment they had to be used with.

Today sound server choice is fairly much pipewire or pulseaudio in year 2000 you had 20 choices in sound servers on Linux with the two majors being esound and artsd yes and kde applications in 2000 would not use esound and gnome applications would not use artsd and same with the other sound server options for other rarer X11 DE of that time frame. Yes those sound servers from 2000 were not stack-able either.

andyprough lot of things have got better when I first used Linux in 1995 I had to manually configure up the X11 server. There is a rose colour glasses problem here a lot of people forget how bad the old distributions were until they go and reinstall them in a virtual machine. Yes go to the debian snapshots server and install a 2000/2005/2010/2015/2020 debian in virtual machines. Yes some of the changes sux badly but every 5 years some major set of user issues have disappeared.

Yes 2000 install will have you in sound server hell with artsd/esound/nas/jackaudio..... and so on. 2005 you will see the start of pulseaudio at this stage using jackaudio and pipewire with each other is still very nightmare. 2010 pulseaudio/jackaudio starts kind of working. Pipewire in the 2020 install is where you start seeing a solution were you can finally use all audio applications on linux under 1 configuration. This audio side is a major improvement. Yes you had to change your sound server over at time each of the major audio changes was moving to a single configuration allows all audio applications that we have now from needing in 2000 up to 15 different configurations. Major improvement in the audio side. That only one example of this. But over that 20 year time frame lot of these thing happened and we take those for granted now.
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[vextium]

Does anyone know what is the build options to do Wayland only builds?