Re: Can I do a pull request on icecat for version 115?

[chippy]

On Wed, 2023-10-11 at 13:55 -0400, bill-auger wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Oct 2023 20:46:36 +0200 chippy wrote:
> > I can draft some documentation for the different OSs if you want
> > since
> > I'm busy anyway building for Linux, Mac OS and Windows. 
> 
> i think this depends on which "different OSs" you are considering
> 
> AFAIK, gnuzilla could not distribute build instructions for windows
> or mac or
> mobile OSes; because those instructions would all need to suggest
> installing
> some non-free tools - many years ago, gnuzilla offered binaries for
> OSes other
> than gnu/linux; but that ceased when it became no longer possible to
> build them
> without non-free tools
> 
> if you prepare something for "Linux", i will review it - presumably,
> it will
> need more specs for each distro (the dependencies at least) - i
> believe that is
> what mark was suggesting
> 
> if instead, you were only considering guides for non-free OSes, you
> would
> probably need to publish them yourself, and i believe that gnuzilla
> could not
> recommend them
I know that there are reasons behind the choice and I agree with these
of course.
I was indeed referring to all OSs, that included Linux too, thinking
that it is ultimately the user the one investing time and effort into
building Icecat. But it makes even more sense thinking that the user
made their choice at the moment of picking an OS, same applies to Apple
users and Android users.

I've been looking into the mobile version of Firefox too, and even the
most radical fork, would still run bits and pieces of telemetry or
google.. things. Not to mention that it needs non-free software to be
built.

So I abandoned the idea of building Icecat for Android. (I'm not
entirely sure but I think I might have seen that even the build system
itself has telemetry, but I might be wrong on this).

Now about Windows and Mac: There are two important facets about Icecat,
and that is, in my opinion, what makes it so important:
On the one hand, it's a user respecting software and thanks to the
bundled extensions and the modifications made with makeicecat, it
offers a certain level of online dignity to the Users.

On the other hand (and this is the important bit), when someone uses
Icecat, the data will stop flowing into bigdata, as well as many of the
other parties that gather data along the way through execution of
javascript, downloading from CDNs etc or even more violating
techniques. This last one goes to the benefit of all the people, I
believe, and this alone makes it worth the effort of building for
Windows and Mac.

I myself wouldn't recommend a binary built by someone unknown, it would
be better if there was a way of guarantee that the binary is built from
a certain source (liek F-droid or OBS). But as I said, this goes to the
advantage of all the community especially if it reaches to the point of
setting a standard or create more awareness.

I say, I think it's worth the time. But I don't expect anyone to agree.

About the documentation, I'll draft what I've been doing on Debian and
possibly some other Linux distros as soon as I have chance.

Chippy