[Dev] [RFC] Let's solve the Chromium freedom issues, definitively

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Fri, 29 May 2020 20:03:47 -0400
Megver83 <megver83 at hyperbola.info> wrote:

> The purpose with this is to create a distro-agnostic project to solve
> the Chromium problem, so then each FSDG distro will implement the
> solutions in their specific ways. I think that ppl from Parabola,
> PureOS and the FSF/GNU project will be the most interested and active
> ones (Trisquel is developed by one person only, and idk if Hyperbola
> devs may even care about this, since they are very strict with their
> browsers' security and Chromium isn't the most secure one)
As I see it, there are several approaches possible:
- Replace Chromium by Gecko somehow. This will need to be done for
  every API that uses chromium, like qt5-webengine, electron and so on.
  The advantage is that we don't have the privacy issues of Chromium
  and we can work with Mozilla upstream if needed. The disadvantage is
  that people might not be able to work on it incrementally, which
  lowers the probability of fixing it a lot, unless people want to
  apply for funding to solve that and/or reserve big quantity of time
  for it. This would work for every distribution almost automatically
  and would probably be easy enough to package, especially if it lands
  in various upstream projects (which require way more work than just
  making that API compatibility).
- Starting from some existing Chromium version, like the one in GuiX,
  and filling bugs and so on.
- As chromium is made of many and many components, it's probably
  possible to package each component, but I wonder if there are
  intermediate use case that would push people to want that and
  maintain it when it will not be possible yet to build chromium from
  such components. Skia is for instance used by other software than
  Chromium as well, so maybe if it's built as a shared library it could
  be useful for Iceweasel as well for instance.

I've started a page about it here:
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Software/research/Chromium

If it's not the right place to do that I can just delete the page. 

Note that anyone can create an FSF account, even non-members, and so
everyone should be able to edit this wiki.

Denis.
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