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

[Megver83]

I get your point, and I understand it completely. For many (most?)
cases, the "use IceCat instead of Chromium" solution works. However,
I've encountered myself webpages that refuse to work with anything that
isn't Chrome (not pages that I use, but that some ppl of my family, e.g.
for business or working in projects) or some web platforms optimized for
Chromium (e.g. Jitsi, although it works in FF and derivatives, but not
completely well). Sometimes changing the user agent works, but not always.

I know this is a bit recherche, but it happens. Now, what you say about
electron, I completely agree. Just let it die. Regarding qt5-webengine,
I agree too, it's a smaller codebase and by liberating it we would
unblacklist hundreds of packages and solve many broken dependencies.
Plus, that would help PureOS too, and they could help us. Maybe we do
not need all the world's help, but we could do this a common effort
between Parabola, qt5-webengine devs and PureOS (if they want to join)

I liked this idea^ :)

El 29-05-20 a las 21:43, bill-auger escribió:
> regarding iridium/ungoogled, this has all been discussed before
> on the FSDG and FSD mailing lists - from what i remember,
> ungoogled is not a browser, but a set of patches - iridium is a
> browser which is made using the ungoogled patches - as we build
> everything from source, the two projects are probably identical,
> for the purpose of discussion
> 
> FWIW, people rarely even ask about chromium anymore - im not
> sure why you think it is worth rescuing - for all the massive
> effort it would take, it would be more practical to focus on
> 'qt5-webengine'
> 
> * it is a much smaller code-base, so less work to do
> * the qt5-webengine devs have expressed an interest in accepting
>   patches for any freedom bugs that are found
> * it would rescued most of the programs which are blacklisted
>   for this association with chromium
> 
> focusing on chromium would be much much more work to audit than
> qt5-webengine - electron is a hopeless cause; so all that
> extra effort would result in removing exactly one additional
> program from the blacklist
> 
> you are right that there is little collaboration of central
> discussion - this issue pops up on various lists from time to
> time - about two years ago, david and adfeno setup a wiki page
> on the FSD, for exactly the same purpose as this OP describes:
> "chromium-fsdg-research"; but it did not get any attention from
> any distro devs - about a year ago, oaken-source suggested on
> the FSDG mailing list, to focus on qt5-webengine rather than
> chromium, and again no one was interested - it is just too much
> work - no one wants to do it
> 
> the FSDG mailing list is the appropriate one to discuss
> this - that is unfortunately the FSDG mailing list is totally
> dysfunctional now, and the chromium quagmire is one of the
> central issues which broke it - i would not waste another moment
> wishing for cross-distro collaboration before that situation is
> fixed
> 
> sadly to say, even if this were conducted on the FSDG mailing
> list, parabola would be the only distro that would benefit from
> the result - the two FSDG distros which wanted chromium and
> webengine, chose to dismiss the concerns, rather than doing the
> work of auditing and liberating them, and added them to their
> repos anyways, against the recommendation of the FSDG work-group
> - the others have shown no interest at all
> 
> if only the *concrete known issues* are considered, then
> probably the ungoogled chromium solves them - that is quite
> irrelevant though; because the current FSDG recommendation for
> chromium is: "use icecat instead" - i would not want to add
> chromium of webengine to parabola before the FSDG work-group
> changes the recommendation - none of the FSDG should want to do
> that - it just makes the problem even uglier
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