Re: [GNU-linux-libre] [PATCH] gnu: Add ungoogled-chromium.

[bill-auger]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2019 20:53:25 -0500 Donald wrote:
> From this thread it seems like there were some legitimate issues that
> the people at Guix have now addressed. Isn't this more a situation of
> possibly changed circumstances?

it would be nice if we could conclude that, but we have very little
(even conflicting) information regarding what guix actually did - the
most i could deduce from their communication with this list is that they
applied the "ungoogled" patch-set and removed some or all 3rd-party
sub-projects - this work-group has previously determined that the
"ungoogled" patches remove some privacy concerns that would be a
necessary part of a sufficient liberation procedure

i think that alone would be a notable difference compared to the version
of chromium that pureos had; which could be enough to address all
currently known FSDG problems - of course no one but adfeno has ever
audited it at any depth; so the "currently known problems" are only the
most superficial ones, detectable without looking at any source code,
such as phoning home and offering proprietary extensions and "apps" in
the GUI

however, now to add to the mystique, the most recent news regarding
this (what appears to be the official release notes) indicates that guix
is no longer using the "ungoogled" team as an upstream[1] - i have no
idea what that implies; but it does appear to make the task of
determining exactly what the guix chromium consist of, significantly
more difficult

i think it is obvious to everyone that guix has been quite cagey with
details thus far, regarding our inquiries; and i could find no
discussion of chromium on the guix dev list since september, when the
consensus of the guix team appeared to be that it was unfit - so, it
seems that in order to know for sure what they have done, determine if
that qualifies it as FSDG-free, and possibly offer it as a
recommendation, we may need to scrutinize the guix package itself, the
sources it pulls in, and what goes into any sourceballs/binaries it
produces


[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-02/msg00367.html