Subject: What to do about unmaintained frameworks like [email-masked] in Guix?

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2017 16:44:14 -0400

We do a good job of deploying security updates to [email-masked].
Typically, we push the update within 24 hours.

However, several packages still depend on [email-masked], which is
unmaintained upstream and surely contains many serious security
vulnerabilities.

$ guix refresh -l [email-masked]
Building the following 6 packages would ensure 10 dependent packages are
rebuilt: aria-maestosa-1.4.11 wxmaxima-16.04.2 filezilla-3.24.1
elixir-1.3.2 kicad-4.0-1.4ee344e audacity-2.1.2

People who install these packages probably do not expect to install
software containing publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities.

We should try to make these packages use a maintained version of
webkitgtk.

If that's not possible, what should we do?

Here is a primer on the tangled world of webkit forks and versions:
https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/02/01/on-webkit-security-updates/

It states that distros should not expect [email-masked] to receive
security updates:
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We could attempt to provide security backports to WebKitGTK+ 2.4. This
would be very time consuming and therefore very expensive, so count this
out.
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