Re: Install GNU IceCat on Mac OS

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi,

Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> writes:
> Beside my personal Guix-System-driven computer, I have to use a computer
> running recent Mac OS. I would like to use IceCat on that device. What's
> the easiest way?

Since you have a Guix system handy, I would use it to build the IceCat
source tarball using "guix build -S icecat", copy the tarball to your
Mac, and then compile it the same way that you would compile Firefox ESR
on a Mac.  I haven't tried it, but I'm not aware of changes made by
'makeicecat' that would cause problems on a Mac.

Note that it's important to include most or all of the contents of
data/buildscripts/mozconfig-common (from the gnuzilla git repo) in the
'mozconfig' file that you use for configuring the build.

You might also want to look at mozconfig-mac, build-mac.sh, and
toolchain-mac.sh in the same directory of the gnuzilla git repo for
hints, although those files probably haven't been tested since 2016 and
are likely out of date.

Please let us know how it goes!

> I tried to compile it using the makeicecat script but I
> ran into issues, which seemed to be sed-related (although I was using
> GNU sed).

Can you be more specific about what issues you ran into?
Also, what makes you think that something went wrong with 'sed'?

> Anyway, is there also still a way to cross-compile?

I've never tried to cross-compile IceCat, and I don't have time to look
into it right now, but if there's a way to cross-compile Firefox ESR, I
suspect that the same method would probably work for IceCat.

      Regards,
        Mark

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