Icecat build failing + torsocks?

Support AUR
1

I’ve become weary of being in Firefox’s hen house. So downloaded and extracted the icecat.tar.gz and then ran torsocks makepkg

Everything seems good until:

==> Starting build()...
Assertion failed in _parse_loader_output:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/sadfa/icecat/icecat/src/gnuzilla-8b54aee6bd0c39f043bbba7a654870e032a910bc/output/icecat-78.9.0/python/mozbuild/mozbuild/mozconfig.py", line 277, in read_mozconfig
    parsed = self._parse_loader_output(output)
  File "/home/sadfa/icecat/icecat/src/gnuzilla-8b54aee6bd0c39f043bbba7a654870e032a910bc/output/icecat-78.9.0/python/mozbuild/mozbuild/mozconfig.py", line 405, in _parse_loader_output
    assert current_type is not None
AssertionError
Error loading mozconfig: /home/sadfa/icecat/icecat/src/gnuzilla-8b54aee6bd0c39f043bbba7a654870e032a910bc/output/icecat-78.9.0/mozconfig

Evaluation of your mozconfig produced unexpected output.  This could be
triggered by a command inside your mozconfig failing or producing some warnings
or error messages. Please change your mozconfig to not error and/or to catch
errors in executed commands.

mozconfig output:

161XXXXXXX WARNING torsocks[X083X]: [syscall] Unsupported syscall number 217. Denying the call (in tsocks_syscall() at syscall.c:567)
------BEGIN_ENV_BEFORE_SOURCE
SHELL=/bin/bash

(...)

MAIL=/var/spool/mail/sadfa
RANLIB=llvm-ranlib
OLDPWD=/home/sadfa/icecat/icecat/src
TEXTDOMAIN=pacman-scripts
_=/usr/bin/python3
------END_ENV_AFTER_SOURCE

==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().
    Aborting...

My goal is to do everything over Tor and systems that are similar to Tor.

FYI, I aready tried torsocks pamac build icecat but could not access some server.

I am fairly new to AUR so sorry if I’m asked silly questions but I open the PKGBUILD file and it says the author in a comment which is nice to see. It also has a commit to fetch and SHA256es to check against. The one thing that I missing though is a cryptographic signature authenticating that this was really submitted by the maintainer. Did I missed something somewhere?

EDIT: I tried going to https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/icecat.tar.gz.asc and I get the message in bold red letters:

No signature for icecat.tar.gz
2
  1. I don’t care about your connection
  2. My personal opinion is you should not abuse tor for package installation.

I don’t know why you blend in tor with this - the correct command to build would be

pamac build icecat

If you are going to do this the arch way - you should ensure the tools are in place, clone the PKGBUILD with git, cd into the folder and run makepkg -is.

$ sudo pacman -Syu git base-devel
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/icecat.git
$ cd icecat
$ makepkg -is

Or you could simply install the bin package

$ pamac build icecat-bin
1 Like
3

Hi @sadfa,

I vaguely remember also getting some kind of error while building/compiling Icecat, so I installed the binary. Much easier and doesn’t take a tenth of thee time. It’s available in the AUR:

$ pamac search icecat
[...]
icecat-bin                                                                                                                                                                                            [Installed] 60.7.0-2  AUR
Binary build of the GNU version of the Mozilla Firefox browser
[...]

So, you can just install that.

pamac build icecat-bin

Hope this helps!

4

Please check versions and pkgbuilds before reccomending them as GNU isn’t releasing precompiled version since some time, last -bin version is 60.7.0 while current is 78.9.0

5

I saw yes. And that is why I wouldn’t, at this moment, recommend it for primary use.

I still use my Firefox Developer Edition as my main browser. However, even if t IS a few versions behind, I think it’s still leagues ahead n a loot of categories.

@sadfa and everyone else regarding this, you could always contact the AUR package maintainer and ask them to upgrade it. I’m just not bothered at the moment.

6

The AUR for IceCat is not outdated because the upstream version is officially still at 60.7.0.

Apparently, “GNU seems not interested doing it anymore” (compiling the package and providing a binary).

Edit: This means, that contacting the AUR maintainer would be useless.

7

True, thank you!

8

I am not recommending anything - I responding to a build issue.

Justifying the usage of a given package - outdated or not - is entirely a user decision.

9