Add FreeBSD support to electron

[teran-mckinney]

Related: #2452

[zcbenz]

As mentioned in #2452, currently we don't have any plan to add support for FreeBSD, but if anyone is interested in sending a pull request, we will be very happy to accept it.

[teran-mckinney]

Hi @zcbenz,

Could you please keep this open? I opened the request and added a bounty to encourage someone to send in a PR adding in FreeBSD support.

Thank you,
Teran

[zcbenz]

Okay.

[yonas]

I'm getting close to compiling electron on FreeBSD 10.3.

I have two errors standing in my way:

https://gist.github.com/yonas/06d08aa591e4a452b16c1e9a9ac5e0f3

but I'm not sure how to fix them. Any C/C++ gurus here? :)

[ghost]

I see that $200 USD has been added to the bounty? Is this going to happen? I think it will rock if it does.

[yonas]

Sorry, I'll try to spend more time on this. If anyone knows C/C++ very well, there are Linux specific parts that need to be re-implemented for FreeBSD.

Yes, Electron is becoming more popular and being used in more apps than just the Atom editor. I'd love to have the Black Screen terminal running on my FreeBSD machine.

[prash-wghats]

Was able to build electron and VSCode in freebsd11RC1. the build instruction is posted in
https://gist.github.com/prash-wghats/89be1ee069d2acf23c289e9c606616e1

[yonas]

@prash-wghats Great work!!! I'm curious, why did you compile with VSCode? Is there anything that GCC or CLANG is missing?

[ilundhild]

This is awesome. Can't wait to try it out, and would love to see those changes moved forward.

[enlight]

@yonas @prash-wghats didn't build using VSCode, he built Electron & VSCode.

[prash-wghats]

@yonas Thanks. Built electron using clang, then used it to run VSCode.

[grahamperrin]

Upped the bounty.

(Incidentally: the reference, above, from an apparently Windows-related issue was the result of steering away from a multi-platform issue for the same product.)

[patrickalima98]

Hello electron team, my compliments!!!! First I would like to congratulate you on the project and also leave here my desire as well as many others to see the electron running in the FresBSD, your application is very impressive and it would be great if you could add support to FreeBSD I very much enjoyed the platform and it would enable the BSDS systems to leverage enabling the creation of incredible apps.

[nomadlogic]

Any chances of the patches referenced by prash-wghats commented on Oct 12, 2016 will be incorporated upstream? Are their blockers preventing this from happening, or anything the FreeBSD community can do to usher this along?

[prash-wghats]

https://github.com/prash-wghats/VSCode-For-FreeBSD/releases.
This binaries were built with freebsd 11.

[pizzamig]

https://github.com/yzgyyang/freebsd-ports-electron is a port, compatible and usable with poudriere, to build a FreeBSD package and is largely based on the great work of @prash-wghats . Without his insight, nothing would be possible.
Unfortunately, the port, as it is, cannot land to the Port Collection, it has too many tricks and things not allowed (especially the libcc and the node packages).
Currently, I'm working on an acceptable port for libcc. If you have ever build chromium from sources, you'll now why it's "time consuming".

[nornagon]

libcc is deprecated and not used in the current build of electron, so probably not a great idea to work on a port for it :)

[thenexxuz]

Having it work in ports is good and all and I agree that it is a good start but there are apps that are closed source (GitKraken for example) I would not expect to have to directly support BSD but if it is an official platform for electron then they could cross compile a BSD build. But that cannot happen until there is an official build. That's just my opinion.

[dariusc93]

I think the main hurdle currently to bring the port upstream is the chromium library. Could be wrong though, but other than that, if the patches for electron itself is brought upstream, then it should be good to go from there but there is also more to it since there is likely libraries out there that isnt built to run on BSD or isnt configured for the platform. It would still need to be work for devs to make sure any native modules can run on BSD as well. If there isnt any dependencies that make use of native modules, then it should be fine.

[kreinholz]

+1 for this! Would love to get Atom and/or VS Code running on FreeBSD. CodeLite and Eclipse are all well and good, but I'd really like to be able to develop with Atom or VS Code without having to hop into a virtual machine running Linux.

[thenexxuz]

How high does the bounty need to get before someone decides to do this? $1000 USD?

[tagattie]

Hi, I have made an experimental port of electron 4.1.x and 5.0.0 for FreeBSD. This is largely based on the works by @prash-wghats and FreeBSD chromium team. If you are interested, take a look at https://github.com/tagattie/FreeBSD-Electron.

I'm running VS Code on FreeBSD with it for a while.

[nornagon]

@tagattie looks like that includes quite substantial changes to Chromium. Are you working with the Chromium team at all to upstream those changes? If not I'm afraid they will quickly go out of date :(

[tehpeh]

@nornagon the Readme states the patches come from the FreeBSD Chromium team.

[pizzamig]

@nornagon The FreeBSD Chromium team maintains a large set of patches, because Google doesn't accept those changes, because FreeBSD (and any other BSDs) is not a platform they're interested in.

[apfeifer]

Published a few hours ago.
https://www.freshports.org/devel/electron4/

[zoujiaqing]

Thanks, can upgrade it to 6.0.x?

[lapo-luchini]

There's a work-in-progress branch for 5.x but nothing on 6.x so far as far as I can see.

[ararslan]

If this is now a registered port, someone should collect the BountySource bounty.

[thenexxuz]

The point of this, if I understand correctly, to have Electron be able to generate a BSD build from any other platform. For example, on a Mac you can generate a Windows EXE or a Linux Binary. This is to allow them to generate the BSD Binary, not having to run BSD and then compile from there.

[crazyBaboon]

+1 I would love to have atom available on FreeBSD. The bounty to fix this is 850$ now!

[grahamperrin]

Might future resolution of this issue allow me to (for example) install FF Password Exporter https://github.com/kspearrin/ff-password-exporter on FreeBSD-CURRENT?

From https://pastebin.com/Z3mmYLh9 I imagine not. Line 19:

Error: GET https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/download/v3.0.6/electron-v3.0.6-freebsd-x64.zip returned 404

Background: MrAlex94/Waterfox#1258 (comment)

[chavez243ca]

Want to see this happen so they can bring Brim to FreeBSD! Will try to contrib to the bounty.

[pizzamig]

electron has been available on FreeBSD for a while.
The maintainer had some issues the packages have been removed when python 2.7 (a dependency) have been removed.
Now he is back and he's working on restoring them (electron7, electron8 and electron9)

[thenexxuz]

electron has been available on FreeBSD for a while.

While you are able to RUN electron apps in FreeBSD you cannot BUILD an app and target BSD like you can with the other OSs. I write an app on a Mac and make a build target Linux or Windows, the same is not true for BSD. In order for a BSD build for an app to be made it needs to be built IN BSD. THAT is the support needed.