Solved Installing Firefox and Thunderbird

coyote_zed

coyote_zed

I just did a fresh install of FreeBSD 12.1 and installed Mate as well. Now I’m trying to install Firefox and thunderbird but pkg doesn’t seem to be able to find the packages.

Any help would be greatly appreciated
 
Have you run:
Code: 
pkg upgrade
A search for firefox should produce this:
Code: 
[f121.150] # pkg search firefox
firefox-74.0_2,1               Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla
firefox-esr-68.6.0,1           Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla
Does pkg work with other common packages, e.g.
Code: 
[f121.163] # pkg search gmake
R-cran-pkgmaker-0.27_2         Package development utilities
gmake-4.2.1_3                  GNU version of 'make' utility
 
I can confirm that for the past 2-3 days, Firefox and Thunderbird were not in packages in FreeBSD 12.1, and that if you did pkg upgrade, Firefox and Thunderbird were removed from the system.
Today they just came back, though, so Coyote should try again.

I've learnt not to just type y and hit enter to pkg anymore, from this. I'm fortunate I had other browsers installed too...
 
So Firefox and Thunderbird are available to me again ...

Just so I can understand better, and avoid the situation in the future, why would the packages be removed if the new packages aren't currently in the repo? It seems like the desired behaviour would be to keep whatever packages are currently installed on the system unless they are explicitly removed or removed by the autoremove functionality.
 
It is probably due to one of its dependencies that broke. That dependency in turn was required for a (probably unrelated) software to function and so it wiped out Firefox because this could no longer build.

Unlike Windows, UNIX-like software shares a single library (rather than provide many of its own versions). Solaris got round this by having many prefixes to install packages of differing versions in.

The joys of rolling release it seems. You can select to use the release pkg repo which never changes but the downside of that is older software (fine of my purposes).

To avoid things like this in the future you might be able to simulate the Solaris idea by creating a /usr/local and /usr/release prefixes. Pretty non-standard but it could be really handy. (or just use a Jail is probably better).
 
kpedersen said:
It is probably due to one of its dependencies that broke. That dependency in turn was required for a (probably unrelated) software to function and so it wiped out Firefox because this could no longer build.
Click to expand...
The updated versions of Firefox and Thunderbird required a newer version of nspr. The update for nspr however was only merged in latest and not in the quarterly branch. Which broke the builds for Firefox/Thunderbird as they depended on a non-existing version of nspr.

kpedersen said:
The joys of rolling release it seems.
Click to expand...
It was actually the quarterly builds that failed, latest was fine.
 
thanks for the help ... I ended up writing a python script that checks to see if Firefox and Thunderbird are currently available and will hold off on updating the system if they aren't available. I figure that as things progress I can always add packages to the script if I want to make sure that they are available
 
Because this is the 'quarterly' repository you will not see Firefox return until June, when the next quarterly branch is cut.
 
Already back, I think:

Code: 
# pkg search firefox
firefox-74.0_2,1               Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla
firefox-esr-68.6.0,1           Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla
# grep url /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf
  url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/quarterly",

I didn't notice any kind of "big bang" quarterly update this March. How can I tell, around the start of a quarter, if it's happened yet?
 
Phishfry said:
Because this is the 'quarterly' repository you will not see Firefox return until June
Click to expand...
Break fixes are imported too. Especially when they're the result of forgetting to update a required port.

putney said:
I didn't notice any kind of "big bang" quarterly update this March. How can I tell, around the start of a quarter, if it's happened yet?
Click to expand...
It's always around the first days of the quarter. The early days of April would be the next one. You can also check the subversion repository, a new quarterly branch is split off there first. Once that's done the build clusters will start building for the new quarterly branch, which can take a while to complete.

[ports] Index of /branches

svnweb.freebsd.org svnweb.freebsd.org
 
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