Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Questions about building from source tarball

[Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com>]

On 10/30/2012 04:56 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   Several years ago, back in the days of Mozilla 0.9x and Phoenix, I
> used to build Mozilla and/or Pheonix from the source tarball.  I've been
> using Gentoo for years, and I've forgotten a lot about building manually
> from source.  I asked this question on mozillazine.org, but no answers
> yet.  Hopefully, I can get some help here.  I'm looking at
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Simple_SeaMonkey_build and I
> have a few questions...
> 
> 1) What options do I need to set to make Seamonkey (or Firefox) build
> in, and run from, a local dir, e.g. "${HOME}/seamonkey"?  Something to
> do with "prefix" and "exec-prefix"?  I'd prefer to avoid jumping to root
> for the install.  And throwing in files in /usr that portage doesn't
> know about, is begging for trouble.
> 

Most of the configuration directives reference the PREFIX by default.
This is from GNU tar, but FF is probably the same:

  Installation directories:
  --prefix=PREFIX         ... [/usr/local]
  --exec-prefix=EPREFIX   ... [PREFIX]

  Fine tuning of the installation directories:
    --bindir=DIR            ... [EPREFIX/bin]
    --sbindir=DIR           ... [EPREFIX/sbin]
    ...

So by default, everything eventually references PREFIX, which defaults
to /usr/local. You can change PREFIX to be e.g. ~/local/ and the rest
should wind up in subdirectories of that. Just double check to make sure
all of the FF defaults refer back to PREFIX.


> 2) I read the instructions on how to pass the "O2" flag to the make and
> compile process. What about the rest of the CFLAGS line?  My CFLAGS are
> 

I use this in my ~/.bashrc:

  # Grab CFLAGS, etc. from make.conf.
  . /etc/portage/make.conf

  # LDFLAGS comes from.. somewhere else.
  LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--as-needed"

  # Portage does this for us.
  MAKE="make ${MAKEOPTS}"

If anyone knows of a slicker way to do LDFLAGS, I'd like to know.