Subject: [bug#28004] Chromium

From: Marius Bakke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2017 23:16:36 +0200

ng0 <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi Marius,
>
> Marius Bakke transcribed 43K bytes:
>> Hello Guix!
>> 
>> Attached is a patch for Chromium, a popular web browser.
>
> Nice! I've been using this from your branch for a while now,
> works just fine :)
> Is this not affected by the chromium discussion which happened
> a while back? Can we include this? I'm all for this, because I
> mainly use it for websites where firefox/icecat doesn't work so
> well, and building it locally takes a very long time.

I believe this is within the Free System Distribution Guidelines. DRM
("Widevine") is disabled at build time, and the Web Store is
non-functional without the end user explicitly enabling it.

There are some grey areas though. The browser may interact with certain
non-free APIs (apart from regular browser duties) such as translation or
prediction services. These features are optional, but some are enabled
by default, and difficult to maintain patches for (I've tried).

However, I have verified that it does not send any unsolicited requests
with the current command-line options, apart from the very first launch
which spawns a login prompt (help wanted!). Without either of those
flags the browser "calls home" every time it starts.

>> Note that I cannot guarantee timely delivery of security updates. Major
>> version upgrades are hugely painful, and almost always contain many
>> high-severity fixes. Should we mention that in the description?
>> 
>> Happy for any feedback.
>> 
>
> Shouldn't you mention defines in addition to the define-public aswell,
> or don't we do that?

Not for new files (modules), typically. I don't think Magit can fill out
those variable names (by pressing C on the hunks) either ;-) But it
should probably go in web-browsers.scm anyway.