Hi Ian,
On Fri, Dec 13, 2024, at 6:38 PM, Ian Eure wrote:
The patches look good to me, thank you for taking this on! How to
handle browser extensions is a subject that’s been on my mind
intermittently, so it’s great to see effort in that direction.
I think it might be non-obvious that IceCat packages affect
non-IceCat browsers. I’d really like to have a solid facility for
managing extensions across the different Firefox forks, either
with generic "browser-extension-ublock-origin" packages; or
something similar to the Common Lisp setup, where
implementation-specific package variants can be derived from a
canonical one.
I've looked into having variant-specific extensions already
added a lot of complexity for little benefits. Maybe I was wrong and you
thought of a better implementation? Still, I think most of the time users
would want their "system add-ons" to be available on all browsers. When this
is not the case, they can already use 'guix shell' to run a Firefox variant
with a different set of extensions, or use the built-in add-on system.
We can however add clarity where things are unclear.
Cheers,
Clément
I lean somewhat towards the latter approach, since
I think it provides a cleaner way of handling differences across
browsers. Given the different release cadences, I think it makes
sense to abstract over the differences in the build tooling rather
than patching the browsers to get consistent behavior.
To be clear here, these patches don’t have to wait for that; I’m
+1 on pushing as-is. But I think we should have a more explicit
system for handling browser extension packages.