Disaster strikes - SeaMonkey removed from ports tree

Money can be an uncomfortable topic. I would be willing to pay 60 bucks a year for SeaMonkey port.
Is that too little? Maybe I would pay $60 to get it back and $60 to keep it active. Not every release but some reasonable frequency.
Seconded. I'm more than a little certain that more users than Phishfry and I
are willing to monetarily support seamonkey AND OTHER PORTS that are
deprecated by a python2.7 dependency to be re-added or continued to be
present in the ports tree. Especially browsers, gui diff tools, ...
 
The cynic in me thinks this:
Firefox exists solely at the behest of Alphabet, purely to stave off anti-trust procedures by the US dept of justice. It therefore does not care about pleasing its users or even considering function above form. It was a real alternative 10 years ago but now is just a horrid mish-mash of poor design, implementation and usability. Oh, and it's slow, bloated and junk.
+1, but...
One day I will tell you how I really think... :sssh:
What hinders you to give a few hints? If there're real hard reasons, just don't write such sentence at all, otherwise, it's just juvenile chit-chat à la "I know more than you, but I can't tell you now".
 
+1, but...

What hinders you to give a few hints? If there're real hard reasons, just don't write such sentence at all, otherwise, it's just juvenile chit-chat à la "I know more than you, but I can't tell you now".
It's irony; and sarcastic as well...
 
Money can be an uncomfortable topic. I would be willing to pay 60 bucks a year for SeaMonkey port.
Is that too little? Maybe I would pay $60 to get it back and $60 to keep it active. Not every release but some reasonable frequency.
I'm willing to pay $A 100 (~$US 77) to get it back and again for ongoing annual support.

However, given the responses so far, the outcome is not looking rosy.

As for why I value SeaMonkey - it is sane (to me) in the way it operates and what it does. As for the specific features that I've always valued:

* the ability to email pages or just links (File > Send page or File > Send link) from within the browser
* the extensive cookie manager
* the extensive image manager
* the extensive popup manager
* the password manager
* the email facility - Message > Edit message as new; Folder properties (eg retention settings are especially handy for mailing lists, cronjob emails etc); Message > Create filter from message; Tools > Message Filters; the fact that my current mail spool goes back to 1996 when I first started using Netscape Communicator on Windows before migrating to FreeBSD (my first FreeBSD 2.0 installation was in April 2005 according to my recently found notebook which was after Mark Williams COHERENT UNIX died and I bid farewell to UUCP for email).
* the Newsfeed facility which I use for forums, blogs and some mailing lists.
* I've never used the HTML Composer (except by accident :) nor the Calendaring.

All of this in a program which has less overhead than Firefox and a more intuitive user interface.

As I also have access to macOS these days, courtesy of my stable of Mac minis the majority of which run FreeBSD, it may be that I fire up an official SeaMonkey there and move my mail spool over which would leave my FreeBSD systems as merely mail and web servers with some occasional Lazarus + Free Pascal programming. In some dark days past, I also experimented with loading my mail spool into Apple Mail which, much to my surprise, worked almost perfectly.

My preference is to continue using FreeBSD as my main desktop operating system which is why I'm prepared to stump up money for SeaMonkey after having used it daily for almost 25 years.
 
I personally would not rely on Apple Mail
Major OS upgrades are always fun :) I'm still on Mojave for the main system for the long-deprecated 32 bit frameworks which were removed in Catalina. Big Sur is ultimately the next stop.

There doesn't seem as much interest in SeaMonkey for FreeBSD as I thought, just two of us willing to pay for its existence so far. There's still time (borrowed time) as the "old" SeaMonkey version is still working on FreeBSD 12 with some tweaks. Que sera sera.
 
For me, Seamonkey would be nice to have for occasional web page testing.
But as its market share is low, so my need is.
However, maybe small donations would help, too.
For this reason I update the current jackpot:

trev : $77
Phishfry : $77
Snurg : $3

Total bounty (initial + annual) : $157

Anybody want to join for $3 up?
 
The main problem is that seamonkey still requires python2.7. It won't be added back into the tree because of that.
I completely agree with that.
Is there so much pythong garbage in seamonkey that it cannot easily be updated upstream to a "modern" pythong?
(Edit: I am interested only in the browser component of seamonkey. I won't care if the mail and composer components get dropped to avoid stinky old pythong...)

Jackpot update:
trev : $77
Phishfry : $77
Snurg : $3
jb_fvwm2 : $80

Total bounty (initial + annual) : $237

More people who want to join for $3 up?
 
I never had any interest in seamonkey cause I still value the "one job, one tool" philosophy.
But then, isn't this python2.7-issue also still present for a lot of other ports?

It pretty much demonstrates the horror of "breaking changes", IMHO.
 
The main problem is that seamonkey still requires python2.7. It won't be added back into the tree because of that.
I believe that it's only for the build system, but that's what killed the Palemoon port as well. The porter proposed using Tauthon to work around this dependency, but that introduced a new problem; some of the dependencies worked only with 2.7, but others had moved on to 3.x. I honestly can't think of a good way to handle this.

Off-topic: I'm thinking my early fear and mistrust of Python might've been correct. I'm beginning to regret having adopted it for some projects:
View: https://twitter.com/espie_openbsd/status/954318738756718593
 
Off-topic: I'm thinking my early fear and mistrust of Python might've been correct.
Not wanting to deliver a rant here, but: it's the "modern world" where "breaking changes" are considered a normal thing. TBH, one of the things I love most about FreeBSD is that it avoids breaking changes as far as possible.
 
Last Seamonkey version (2.53.6) compiles and runs out of the box in FreeBSD 11.4, just untar the source, run
Code:
./mach build
and you have it, even got to make a rudimentary port that produces a working package, not sure if it uses python27 or python37 as I have both installed.

As for its safety issues, I think any modern browser should be run in an isolated environment behind a very restrictive firewall, the fact there are no publicly known vulnerabilities doesn't mean they are safe, at least for me.
 
Last Seamonkey version (2.53.6) compiles and runs out of the box in FreeBSD 11.4, just untar the source, run
Code:
./mach build
and you have it, even got to make a rudimentary port that produces a working package, not sure if it uses python27 or python37 as I have both installed.

As for its safety issues, I think any modern browser should be run in an isolated environment behind a very restrictive firewall, the fact there are no publicly known vulnerabilities doesn't mean they are safe, at least for me.
Same on 13.0-RC2. Built in 18 minutes!! Compated to 3hrs.something for firefox... Who could guess it would be SO simple... And you told us for free, thanks again :D:D:D
 
It will if you block all outgoing traffic save a few trusted sites, if the browser can't get the malicious code it will stay safe.
That "trusted" site might have the exploit embedded in it. What I'm trying to say here is that a firewall that works on layer 3/4 isn't going to protect you against exploits that are on layer 7.
 
Thats interesting. I see the source code is for all platforms.

What is mach build. Is that Apple/MAC building process via clang?

How about FreeBSD 12 ? Did you try that? FreeBSD 11 is coming close to an end.
I guess it's a python based build scripts system. It uses configure, make, clang & friends.
And since it builds on both 11 and 13, then I shouldn't be surprised if it builds on 12 as well. If you have all the build depends installed.
 
OK got the source extracted to /usr/opt/seamonkey-2.53.6 but this is a fresh FreeBSD 12.2 from a botched freebsd-update.

What I need is a suggestion on is python version. I have no python on this install yet.

So where in the source can I tell the needed python version?
 
From configure
Code:
which python2.7 > /dev/null && exec python2.7 "$TOPSRCDIR/configure.py" "$@" || exec python "$TOPSRCDIR/configure.py" "$@"
So this needs Python 2.7 ? Should i dig up an old python27.txz ?
Why are they clinging to an EOL version of python?

I do see a beta that may contain new work. I will look at it.
 
No luck with beta. Still on old version 2.7 Python.
With python 2.7 only needed for build/compile that don't sound to bad.
I will try that for a personal build.
 
Back
Top