[Slackbuilds-users] Mozilla NSS [was: Update - 20070513]

[Robby Workman]

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Bruno Gomes wrote:
> Why is necessary "mozilla-nss" package?


Gaim (and now Pidgin) needs NSS libraries to support encryption
(which is required for MSN and Google Talk).  It can get the needed
libraries from either Mozilla's NSS or GnuTLS.

With Seamonkey installed, Pidgin will link to its NSS and build
just fine, and it will work.  However, as you might have seen in
Slackware 11.0 previously, a Seamonkey security update (1.0.7 to
1.0.8) changed the NSS ABI, so the MSN and Google Talk accounts
no longer worked (if I remember correctly, it caused gaim to segfault
when these protocols were used).  This prompted Pat to add the
standalone mozilla-nss package and build gaim against it instead,
as the ABI is supposed to be stable in the standalone package.

When Pidgin 2.0.0 released, it was discovered that it would not
link to the standalone mozilla-nss package.  As I understand it,
this seems to be due to Pidgin looking for a mozilla-nss.pc file
that is not included in the official mozilla-nss sources, and it
also requires the header files in the 'obsolete' directory of the
mozilla-nss package.  In other words, Pidgin seems to need a
non-standard mozilla-nss, but they fail to note this in their build
requirements.

As you saw in our old SlackBuild script, we were using GnuTLS due
to the fact that Pidgin wouldn't compile against the standalone
mozilla-nss package.  For us, that's not a problem, but for
Slackware proper, adding gnutls to 11.0's /patches would require
also adding libgpg-error and libgcrypt, while mozilla-nss only
required adding itself, so Pat elected to add mozilla-nss instead.
If the Pidgin sources had documented that they needed a non-standard
mozilla-nss to build against, or had I been super-l33t like Eric  ;-)
I would have elected to build our version against it instead of
GnuTLS.

RW

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