Hacker News Reader

Comment by doublerabbit | Hacker News Reader

It's disappointing for that there is no FreeBSD release nor any easy way to find the source for that matter.

Even within their github, there's no source of the client unless I'm missing something?

https://github.com/orgs/thunderbird/repositories

Edit: Wow, to the down-voters you seriously hate FreeBSD that much that I cannot even state my opinion without yourselves needing to down-vote? Why?

It is disappointing that we can't have another OS in the same realm as others and yet we have to keep the whole fanboi cliche going. It's ridiculous, we live in 2024 and yet still have this petty rivalry.

If Thunderbird is able create packages for Snap, Debian, CentOS anything else Linux -- why can they not create packages for FreeBSD?

View on HN

It’s in FreeBSD ports, what’s wrong with that?

https://www.freshports.org/mail/thunderbird/

Nothing wrong, but why isn't the package listed upon Thunderbird's website, nor created officially when they do so for Linux?

From someone who complain abouy FreeBSD haters you seem very little informed on what is FreeBSD, how the project is organized and how people typically install software on it.

I am well aware that I could do "pkg install thunderbird" or use ports.

My own preference is to explore the repo and compile it from the repo itself. Do you have a problem with that?

>My own preference is to explore the repo and compile it from the repo itself. Do you have a problem with that?

You are shifting the goal post. You don't need a prepackaged FreeBSD release for that, you can pull the sources from mozilla's mercurial repo.

Not at all, reread my post.

> It's disappointing for that there is no FreeBSD release nor any easy way to find the source for that matter.

The point I'm making their were no packages for FreeBSD nor any easy listing of accessing the source.

The GitHub repo I found, did not contain nor was I aware that Mozilla uses Mercurial. Precompiled packages exist for Linux, but not FreeBSD outside of the FreeBSD port system. Not even a mention.

I agree the information about the location of the source code is buried in the developer doc that you access when hitting contribute. I think an open source product could do better and make the source code more easily accessible.

The source is in Mercurial (like most code from Mozilla), not GitHub. There's instructions on developer.thunderbird.net.

Great thanks.

The source code is here: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central, although you also need a checkout of https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central for the Gecko code.

Also, Thunderbird does support FreeBSD, in that FreeBSD-specific bugs will be triaged and fixed, although it's obviously not a primary platform of support.

Why should they bother making a specific release for FreeBSD if a port maintainer does the job well?

Why should it be a job of a FreeBSD port maintainer and not Thunderbird maintaining the port?

Because that is the way the linux distros and BSD traditionnally package software and this is the most integrated way for the user who is just a small command away to get the software. Additionally it removes the burden of maintaining tens of operating system packages to the developers who can still decide to themselves be the maintainers if that is their wish or nobody else want to do it. A win-win situation.

Do you prefer the users to look for software, figure out from themselves they are hitting the right website and not a fake clone with same software but with integrated malware, then to download them and install them with a terrible install process involving hitting next next next install while making sure to not let a checkbox checked that will had some adware like in old win9x days?

BSD ports and curated linux software package repositories are the origins/ancestors of the "app" stores for good reasons. The later only add some voting systems and putting the burden of package maintenance on the software developers, remove curation and don't really prevent rogue mainteners to release malicious clones. I prefer the linux/BSD way.

Yeah, I'm just saying that maybe Thunderbird should create their own package to ensure 100% is as they want it.

Ports only gives myself a selection chosen by the packager, for example Chromium package does not have PulseAudio enabled. I had to recompile it myself to enable Pulse.

> Yeah, I'm just saying that maybe Thunderbird should create their own package to ensure 100% is as they want it.

That was not really the tone of your original comment.

They have perfectly the right to not care enough to not care enough to package it themselves. I am fine if they are just willing to correct bugs and/or upstream any patch a freebsd port maintainer would send them.

Besides you can change ports compilation options with `make config` as well as forking the ports into your own local repo on which you would maintain your own patches if needed. That can be done without any work from the thunderbird or FreeBSD teams.

Either or. No listing of FreeBSD.

It seems that Thunderbird itself uses mercurial, not git:

https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/ge...

But yeah, it is really weird that there isn’t really a way to find the source code (or this developer.thunderbird.net page) from the main site as far as I can tell

It's on the Contribute->Participate page.

Oh, I was looking at the blog site but assumed it’s the main page because I got there by clicking the logo and it had buttons like “download thunderbird”… my bad

Not your bad at all. It is definitely their bad for having the logo link to the blog instead of the main page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com