gnewsense-users
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [gNewSense-users] firefox in search of a solution revisited [long ma


From: Brian Brazil
Subject: Re: [gNewSense-users] firefox in search of a solution revisited [long mail]
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2006 20:54:05 +0000

On 11/19/06, rek2 gnu/linux <address@hidden> wrote:
Palle Raabjerg escribió:
> Obviously, since this is no big distro (yet!), the number of packages
> that needs to be maintained by gNewSense should be kept at a minimum.
> I am also for adding IceWeasel, and perhaps gnash, and taking out
> Firefox. Ubuntu carries no IceWeasel debs. Does Debian maintain a Free
> IceWeasel package? If so, is this something we could copy/steal/hog in
> some way? ;)
yes, of course and really like you say it just a matter of  one person
to download the src make the changes we agree upon on and make a .deb
package.  one package or lets say 10 packages on gnewsense to maintain
is not a big thing for a start..

For a start, yes. When you have to backport security patches, not so much.
Historically, Mozilla haven't been at all nice in this department.
What happens with iceweasel remains to be seen.

> (On that note, would a "hack", like adding firefox-bin symlinks
> pointing to the iceweasel binary to the package be acceptable? Any
> other program which then wants firefox specifically, gets IceWeasel
> instead. It's not extremely "nice", but it would probably work well
> enough).

I agree with this only in part... I don't think it will be nice of us to
just point it to the package.. instead  will be much
better to give a pop up msg or some kind of... "since you decided to use
a completly free software distribution of the GNU/Linux system, we have
done bla, bla, bla, and consider you will agree with us to use bla bla
bla.. etc"
that will be a bit much nicer.. if we just point them to another program
when they expecting something else looks weird :-) is like are trying to
dictate  them what they should use with out even telling them. just my
opinion.

Symlinks would be required, otherwise we'd have to recompile a lot
more pacakges that depend on the location of the binary. I'd suggest
reading up on the reason for the debian alternatives system (the
mechanics don't help us in this case).

As it stands, my preferred solutions:
1. recompile firefox, leave it as firefox with the packaging changed,
but not the source (are we allowed do this?)
2. recompile firefox. Rename.
3. Remove firefox. Recompile all dependant packages to use something else.
4. Remove firefox. Replace with IceWeasel

I do consider firefox as-is in gNewSense to be free software, however
the obvious references to non-free stuff is a concern that we should
do something about.

Brian




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]