Re: Packaging a free Firefox

[Nils Gillmann]

Clément Lassieur transcribed 1.5K bytes:
> 
> Clément Lassieur <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I find Icecat very buggy, even if I compare it to a home-made Firefox
> > package that inherits Icecat (and thus is very close to Icecat).  For
> > example I can't even pay with my credit card with icecat-52-guix,
> > whereas I can with firefox-home-52-guix.  (It looks like a javascript
> > issue.)  Also, lots of videos don't work, and it's difficult to know
> > whether it's because of technical issues or because of DRM.
> >
> > This may discourage people from using GuixSD.
> >
> > My understanding is that Icecat exists because of two reasons:
> >   1. a trademark/logo issue,
> >   2. the need to remove non-free code from Firefox.
> >
> > But it does more:
> >   3. it only packages the stables versions of Firefox,
> >   4. it adds add-ons,
> >   5. it prevents the installation of non-free plugins,
> >   6. probably other things that I'm not aware of.
> >
> > It seems to me that the trademark/logo issue and the non-free code
> > removal could be dealt with at the Guix packaging level.  It's probably
> > just a huge bunch of substitutes to do.  The package would be huge, but
> > at least we would have control on it.
> >
> > That would remove a layer of complexity, and probably reduce bugs (that
> > come from that layer).  That would also allow us to have a recent
> > version of Firefox.
> >
> > And it would be way better than everyone (I exaggerate a bit) having his
>                                                                 their  ^
> > home-made non-maintened full-of-security-issues Firefox.
> >
> > What do you think?
> > Clément
> 
> 
Among other things I've been working on Firefox. Not exactly with the intention
of a free one per se, but at least to have it. I've been updating Aurora Nightly
for a while.
Thing is, it get's tricky after 54.0 due to mandatory Rust. I wanted to give the
Rust problem another try soon, if you are serious about this, I can try and 
summarize
it or provide snippets. You'l be able to find the package definitions, but they 
do
not apply to Guix package structure (also I need to relicense it. whatever 
you'll
find AGPL3 licensed is in fact GPL3 licensed now. I am just too busy to fix the
headers, will do it on the weekend).. if I have commited the recent changes to 
the
wip version.
I seem to remember that the gnuzilla mailinglist did drop some hints about the 
core
issue I had with rust.