gcc update succeeded! (plus: four heads are better than one)

Our failure upgrading to gcc 4.6.3 in the prior post turned out to be a canary in the coal mine (though in retrospect issue 169 was the first manifestation of the underlying problem) because soon after, Tobias started finding problems in some of his test builds for AuroraFox, and SeaMonkeyPPC wouldn't run at all either. Tobias was able to show that Apple ld had generated a bad branch in the Mozilla megalibrary XUL (which has been an intrinsic part of Firefox and all of our PPC community derivatives including AuroraFox, Tenfourbird and SeaMonkeyPPC since Mozilla 5), and my analysis showed it to be completely out of range. Ben's and my thought was to slim down XUL, but Tobias was able to find the bug in Apple ld to properly handle such large branches, hikerxbiker was able to prove it worked against SeaMonkeyPPC, and this post is, voila, coming to you from a debug build of 19.0a2 on the G5. So TenFourFox lives once more. Tobias has upstreamed this linker fix to MacPorts; our Fink users should make sure they make a similar fix themselves.

This is why it's wonderful to have a community working on continuing the PowerPC OS X Mozilla ports. As an example of what happens when there isn't a community, it looks like the OS/2 port of Firefox, one of the longer running Tier-3 community builds, is running out of gas; they're still stuck on ESR 10 and the lone guy still cranking them out, Dave Yeo, doesn't have a lot of resources to turn to when things go wrong. They're already somewhat compromised in that WOFF downloadable fonts don't work right, so they're not fully Acid3-compliant as it is. I think this is going to happen to a lot of the smaller Tier-3 ports: ourselves and Landry Breuil on the OpenBSD side are about the only ones supporting big-endian hardware (WebKit even took big endian support out of YARR, the regexp library our JavaScript compiler uses, which we had to put back in), we don't see anything much going on with Solaris on SPARC these days, and I'm not sure what the state of Firefox is on the PPC Linuces since a lot of those users have migrated to WebKit-based browsers. It is entirely possible that the OS/2 port will end with Firefox ESR 10. And as an admirer of OS/2 back in the day, that's very sad to see happen.

Fortunately, that won't happen to us, at least not yet. Most of the 10.5 compatibility code has been restored successfully (and backported to 10.4, of course), and I have not found any major bugs in this version except for a strange problem with favicons I'm not able to fully track down yet. Now that we're running on a current compiler for a change, I was able to jettison all the ugly fixes I had to make for gcc 4.0.1 and make our changesets smaller and easier to maintain. When 19 goes into beta I'm going to pull it again and possibly generate some opt builds for people to play with, starting our new unstable branch off right. I'm also going to begin work on our PowerPC IonMonkey port and let's hope we get it done before Mozilla sends JaegerMonkey to that great tracing compiler in the sky. Remember: no plugin support exists at all in 18+.

For the stable branch, we will issue a fix for issue 194, which is a Mozilla bug actually but that doesn't appear is being backported to ESR17, and I'm looking into issue 195 where the check for dud fonts introduced with issue 171 can slow down the browser when it gets run unnecessarily, though this probably won't be fixed in time for 17.0.2, our "Best Commodore 64 Monitor Ever" release.