firefox-beta?

[Jan Beich]

"Ronald Klop" <ronald at klop.ws> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I'm mailing you as you committed the recent updates to the www/firefox
> port.
> In the last update to 5.1 you mention 'This one intended to pick up
> upstream security fixes earlier while looking for downstream
> regressions'.
> Is there a reason not to have a firefox-beta port? That would make it
> easy for people to test before release and spot regressions. I always
> run the -beta on other OSes (where it is easy to download/install) to
> test websites before a new release. I would love to be able to do that
> on FreeBSD also.

www/firefox-beta did exist in freebsd-gecko dev repo a few years ago.
Unlike www/firefox-nightly it didn't suffer from patch churn as much but
had less users and no Q/A at all to justify the maintenance cost. Both
were abandoned in favor of firefighting regressions upstream.

If you're interested in features from an unreleased Firefox version
consider building outside of ports e.g.,

  $ pkg install python27
  $ hash git 2>/dev/null || pkg install mercurial
  $ hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified firefox ||
    git clone https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev firefox
  $ cd firefox
  $ hg up beta || git co origin/beta # optional, if you don't want Nightly
  $ ./mach bootstrap # select Firefox for Desktop
  $ nice ./mach build
  $ ./mach run