Building Firefox for ALSA (non PulseAudio) Sound (Shallow Thoughts)

Building Firefox for ALSA (non PulseAudio) Sound

I did the work to built my own Firefox primarily to fix a couple of serious regressions that couldn't be fixed any other way. I'll start with the one that's probably more common (at least, there are many people complaining about it in many different web forums): the fact that Firefox won't play sound on Linux machines that don't use PulseAudio.

There's a bug with a long discussion of the problem, Bug 1345661 - PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems; and the discussion in the bug links to another discussion of the Firefox/PulseAudio problem). Some comments in those discussions suggest that some near-future version of Firefox may restore ALSA sound for non-Pulse systems; but most of those comments are six months old, yet it's still not fixed in the version Mozilla is distributing now.

In theory, ALSA sound is easy to enable. Build pptions in Firefox are controlled through a file called mozconfig. Create that file at the top level of your build directory, then add to it:

ac_add_options --enable-alsa
ac_add_options --disable-pulseaudio

You can see other options with ./configure --help

Of course, like everything else in the computer world, there were complications. When I typed mach build, I got:

Assertion failed in _parse_loader_output:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/akkana/outsrc/gecko-dev/python/mozbuild/mozbuild/mozconfig.py", line 260, in read_mozconfig
    parsed = self._parse_loader_output(output)
  File "/home/akkana/outsrc/gecko-dev/python/mozbuild/mozbuild/mozconfig.py", line 375, in _parse_loader_output
    assert not in_variable
AssertionError
Error loading mozconfig: /home/akkana/outsrc/gecko-dev/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:

------BEGIN_ENV_BEFORE_SOURCE

... followed by a many-page dump of all my environment variables, twice.

It turned out that was coming from line 449 of python/mozbuild/mozbuild/mozconfig.py:

   # Lines with a quote not ending in a quote are multi-line.
    if has_quote and not value.endswith("'"):
        in_variable = name
        current.append(value)
        continue
    else:
        value = value[:-1] if has_quote else value

I'm guessing this was added because some Mozilla developer sets a multi-line environment variable that has a quote in it but doesn't end with a quote. Or something. Anyway, some fairly specific case. I, on the other hand, have a different specific case: a short environment variable that includes one or more single quotes, and the test for their specific case breaks my build.

(In case you're curious why I have quotes in an environment variable: The prompt-setting code in my .zshrc includes a variable called PRIMES. In a login shell, this is set to the empty string, but in subshells, I add ' for each level of shell under the login shell. So my regular prompt might be (hostname)-, but if I run a subshell to test something, the prompt will be (hostname')-, a subshell inside that will be (hostname'')-, and so on. It's a reminder that I'm still in a subshell and need to exit when I'm done testing. In theory, I could do that with SHLVL, but SHLVL doesn't care about login shells, so my normal shells inside X are all SHLVL=2 while shells on a console or from an ssh are SHLVL=1, so if I used SHLVL I'd have to have some special case code to deal with that.

Also, of course I could use a character other than a single-quote. But in the thirty or so years I've used this, Firefox is the first program that's ever had a problem with it. And apparently I'm not the first one to have a problem with this: bug 1455065 was apparently someone else with the same problem. Maybe that will show up in the release branch eventually.)

Anyway, disabling that line fixed the problem:

   # Lines with a quote not ending in a quote are multi-line.
    if False and has_quote and not value.endswith("'"):

and after that, mach build succeeded, I built a new Firefox, and lo and behond! I can play sound in YouTube videos and on Xeno-Canto again, without needing an additional browser.

Tags: web, firefox, linux
[ 16:49 Jun 09, 2018    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]