Re: Firefox 52's end of life, packaging Chromium

[Amirouche Boubekki <amirouche.boubekki@gmail.com>]

Hello all :]

I will confess that if I use Ubuntu today, long story short, it's
because of the web browser.
I could not find my way around patchelf so I gave up and installed Ubuntu.

The matter relates to me a lot!

Le mer. 29 août 2018 à 11:03, Clément Lassieur <clement@lassieur.org> a écrit :
>
> Hi,
>
> Firefox 52 isn't supported anymore upstream[1] and we don't have a
> package for Firefox 60.
>   Currently the only alternative is Epiphany but
> it's close to unusable (it crashes every 5 minutes, and sometimes
> freezes my computer).

Here the list of known issues:
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/pkgreport.cgi?package=guix;include=subject:epiphany

>
>
> So the question is: can we push the Chromium package?  I've read it's
> almost ready[2].

>   It's probably far better than everything we have,
> despite not being totally 'finished'.  Maybe we can add what's left to
> do as a TODO and fix the package later?
>
> What do you think?
>
> Clément
>
> [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/01/11/announcing-esr60-policy-engine/
> [2]: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=28004#233


Not having access to a recent web browser can be a pain. That said
they are alternatives.
Many that don't involve more guix energy to be sucked into supporting
chromium or firefox
which I predict to be really painful in the future. Web browsers are
not just about getting the
initial package inside the main repository. It's a lot of pain.

What I think is that we choose our battle wisely. If this discussion
did not pop on the mailling list
I would be doing something else. Nevermind.

Let's choose our battle wisely. I want to remind that the core of the guix users
are GNU followers and are also anything but pro web or pro web browser or a
variation of that. I don't say every GNU follower is against the www.
It's not the
core of potential guix users

I won't help to bring firefox or chromium because I think even if done
ethically will
be a worthless time sink.

Let's be rational, and try to answer the following questions:

1) What firefox or chromium are useful for compared to other graphical
web browsers?

2) What will chromium bring to guix and guix developers that they
can't do otherwise?

3) What are the minimal features for a graphical web browser to be
useful for a guix developer?


I was going to say, let's find or build a minimal browser that use
qtwebkit but even that is
worthless because several people reported performance build issues
about it on IRC.

Sorry, it seems like a worthless timesink to me. The only thing
worthwhile is to build a
web browser using Guile but that will take several years before one
can use it instead
of Chromium... I still don't know why people would want to use that
except for SaaSS
stuff.

They are workarounds.

---

> The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a
> natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that
> was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like
> that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was
> done by amateurs.

Alan Kay.