THIS WILL BE REMOVED AT A LATER DATE.

It's a proof of concept showing early modifications of lbmk, turning it into lwmk - LibreWolf MaKe, for building librewolf releases. I'm doing this for fun, to replace LibreWolf's source.git and bsys6.git build systems. Most features not added yet, but lbmk's "mkhelper" feature can (and will) be used to implement custom logic e.g. interacting with the mach build system in firefox. This will be a unified package manager for building many firefox derivatives, starting with LibreWolf, with the aim that all of the mozilla forks later use it, and perhaps work more closely with each other. I will publish this on a separate website when it's ready. **You are looking at an old version of it. I'm much further ahead locally. I will release it when it's finished!"

LibreWolf

This repository contains all the patches and theming that make up LibreWolf, as well as the LibreWolf preferences (in settings/) and the scripts and Makefile to build LibreWolf.

This is a re-design of the LibreWolf build system, called LibreWolf MaKe, or just lwmk for short. It is a fork of the LibreBoot MaKe (lbmk) build system, which Libreboot uses to build coreboot images. It was decided that this design is beneficial for LibreWolf, as it offers advanced features by comparison, such as:

• Automatic caching of sources when downloading (Git repositories are used)
• Redundant repository links are possible, for reliability in the future
• Ability to declare custom git submodules, regardless of whether a project uses them; actual git submodules are unused. The lwmk design allows systematic patching and revision resets on submodules.
• Ability to download files as submodules as well, hash-checking everything. Both git repositories and files are checked relentlessly, even when using local cache, to ensure integrity and general reproducibility.
• Multi-tree design: projects like firefox can be build single- or multi-tree. In lwmk nomenclature, this means that a given project can have multiple targets, or just build one target. Multi-tree is preferred, where feasible; in lwmk, you can specify multiple revisions of Firefox, and multiple targets off of each tree name on the given revision. An application for this might be providing LibreWolf along with variants like LibreWolf-Hellfire, or more opiniated forks of LibreWolf that mostly just change a few configs.
• Completely generalised design. The mk script and include/ directory do not generally contain project-specific build logic. Each project can use mkhelpers to specify custom steps e.g. pre-configure, post-build, and so on, much like on a BSD ports system. This design is reminiscent of a Linux distro, because indeed it was first implemented for Libreboot which is a coreboot distro; this design generalises the downloading, patching and building of any source tree. It is highly flexible and configurable.
• Ease of use. Despite high configurability, the overarching philosophy is like that for OpenBSD: Knobs are for nobs. We want everything to be as simple as possible for the user, with sane defaults for everything. The design of the entire build system reflects this philosophy.

The lwmk build system can generate binaries on the spot, and it does so using out-of-tree building. It can also generate clean source tarballs of sources e.g. Firefox sources.

The multi-tree nature of LibreWolf MaKe mean that you can support any number of actual Firefox derivatives. This build system is designed for use with the LibreWolf project, but it is intended that this design be used on every other Firefox fork; perhaps the projects can even work with each other, or there can be another project that uses this design and generalises all of the Mozilla forks. This might be useful for Linux distros, which can then just do something like:

./mk -b firefox

This would build every variant of Firefox in lwmk. Every defined tree, at each defined revision, for each target defined referencing each tree. The best part: because it uses the same design from the Libreboot build system, there are no make files in the tree, until you run ./mk -f.

One caveat: this is a very much Linux- and BSD-brained build system. It is NOT designed to run on others like Windows or Mac. That being said, it can generate source tarballs of Firefox and its variants such as LibreWolf. These tarballs are cross-platform, and that will always be the case.

Infra

Overview

graph LR
    FFSRC(Firefox Source)

    FFSRC--Tarball--->Source

    subgraph LibreWolf/
    Website(Website<br><br>- Documentation<br>- FAQ)
    subgraph Browser/
        Source(Source<br><br>- Patches<br>- Theming<br>- Settings<br>- Weblate<br>- Build scripts)
        bsys6(bsys6<br><br>New Docker building<br>repository)
        AppImage
        ArchGentoo["Arch / Gentoo"]
    end
    end
    Website-->librewolf.net
    Source--"Source tarball"-->bsys6
    AppImage--".appimage"-->librewolf.net
    bsys6--"Windows setup.exe"--->librewolf.net
    bsys6--"Windows portable.zip"--->librewolf.net
    bsys6--"Windows .msix"--->MS("Microsoft Store")
    bsys6--"Windows .nupkg"--->Chocolatey
    bsys6--"Linux binary tarball"--->Flathub
    bsys6--"Linux binary tarball"--> AppImage
    bsys6--"Linux .deb"--->repo.librewolf.net
    bsys6--"Linux .rpm"--->repo.librewolf.net
    bsys6--"Linux binary tarball<br>for 'librewolf-bin'"--> ArchGentoo
    Source--"Source tarball<br>for 'librewolf'"-->ArchGentoo
    ArchGentoo-->AUR_Overlay["AUR / Overlay"]

Packages

These are the locations where people have their repositories and build artifacts.

Active:

• Arch - Arch Linux package
• BSYS6 - Linux Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu, MacOS, portable and setup for Windows
• Gentoo - Gentoo GNU/Linux package

Downstream:

• Alpine Linux

Forks

Previous:

• CachyOS Browser
• FireDragon Browser

Build

There are two ways to build LibreWolf. You can either use the source tarball or compile directly with this repository.

Build: Tarball

1. Let's download the latest tarball. This tarball is the latest produced by the CI. You can also check the sha256sum of the tarball there:

   tar xf <tarball>
   cd <folder>
   

2. Then, you have to bootstrap your system to be able to build LibreWolf. You only have to do this one time. It is done by running the following command:

   ./mach --no-interactive bootstrap --application-choice=browser
   

3. Build LibreWolf and then package or run it with the following commands:

   ./mach build && ./mach package
   # or
   ./mach build && ./mach run
   

   Note

   To get all parameters of ./mach, use:

   ./mach configure -- --help | less
   

Build: Repository

1. Clone this repository with Git:

   git clone --recursive git@librewolf.dev:librewolf/source.git librewolf-source --depth=1 && cd librewolf-source
   

2. Build LibreWolf source code, also you have to bootstrap your system to be able to build LibreWolf. You only have to do this one time.

   make dir && make bootstrap
   

3. Package LibreWolf or run it with the following commands:

   make build && make package
   # or
   make build && make run
   

Translations

We use Weblate to localize all LibreWolf-specific strings. You can help us by translating LibreWolf into your language at https://translate.codeberg.org/engage/librewolf. Here is the current translation status:

Development

Development: Creating a patch

The easiest way to make patches is to go to the LibreWolf source folder:

cd librewolf-$(cat version)
git init
git add <path_to_file_you_changed>
git commit -am initial-commit
git diff > ../mypatch.patch

We have Gitter / Matrix rooms, and on the website we have links to the various issue trackers.

Development: Existing patches

The easiest way to make patches is to go to the LibreWolf source folder:

make fetch
./scripts/git-patchtree.sh patches/sed-patches/disable-pocket.patch

Now change the source tree the way you want, keeping in mind to git add new files. When done, you can create the new patch with:

cd firefox-<version>
git diff 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904 HEAD > ../my-patch-name.patch

This ID is the hash value of the first commit, which is called initial. Don't forget to commit changes before doing this diff, or the patch will be incomplete.

Development: Creating a patch for problems in Mozilla's Bugzilla

Well, first of all:

• Create an account.
• Handy link: Bugs Filed Today.
• The essential: Firefox Source Tree Documentation.

Now that you have a patch in LibreWolf, that's not enough to upload to Mozilla. See, Mozilla only accepts patches against Nightly. So here is how to do that:

1. If you have not done so already, create the mozilla-unified folder and build Firefox with it:

   hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified && cd mozilla-unified
   hg update
   MOZBUILD_STATE_PATH=$HOME/.mozbuild ./mach --no-interactive bootstrap --application-choice=browser
   ./mach build
   ./mach run
   

2. If you skipped the previous step, you could ensure that you're up to date with:

   cd mozilla-unified
   hg pull && hg update
   

3. Now you can apply your patch to Nightly:

   patch -p1 -i ../mypatch.patch
   

4. Now, let Mercurial create the patch:

   hg diff > ../my-nightly-patch.patch
   

5. After this, it can be uploaded to Bugzilla.

Development: Contributing

Time to start hacking! You should join us on Matrix, say hello in the Introduction channel, and find a bug to start working on. See the Firefox Contributors' Quick Reference to learn how to test your changes, send patches to Mozilla, update your source code locally, and more.

MacOS and Windows

We understand, life isn't always fair 😺. The same steps as above apply you will just have to walk through the beginning part of the guides for:

• MacOS: The cross-compiled Mac .dmg files are somewhat new. They should work, perhaps with the exception of the make setup-wasi step.
• Windows: Building on Windows is not very well tested.

Help with testing these targets is always welcome.