Subject: Re: bug#51478: icecat 91 can't display chinese font in many web page

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2021 16:16:56 -0400

Z572 via Bug reports for GNU Guix <[email-masked]> writes:
> after update to 91, icecat can't display chinese font for many web page:

Thanks for the report.

As a temporary workaround, it might help to visit <about:config> and
change the setting for "security.sandbox.content.read_path_whitelist"
to contain simply "/gnu/store/".

Doing so will make your IceCat do what all other modern web browsers in
Guix do: simply give the browser sandbox access to *all* of /gnu/store/.
The disadvantage of doing so is that the sandbox will then able to see
the complete list of Guix-installed software components installed on
your system, as well as the precise version numbers of those software
components.

To my knowledge, IceCat is the only modern web browser packaged in Guix
that attempts to build a precise whitelist of directories within
/gnu/store/ that the sandbox is given access to.

When updating our Guix package to IceCat 91, I discovered that it is now
necessary to add font directories to the whitelist, whereas that was not
needed in IceCat 78.  For now, I've added 'font-dejavu' as an explicit
input to our 'icecat' package, and added its font/share directory to the
whitelist.  However, I can see now that this solution is not adequate.

To be continued...

       Mark

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