Subject: Re: [bug#67512] [PATCH 0/5] Add LibreWolf

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 19:39:40 +0100

Hi Ian,

Ian Eure <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

[...]

>> This is much appreciated!  People often complain that IceCat is
>> based on
>> too old a version of Firefox, so if we can have LibreWolf (or even
>> Firefox without its problematic bits), that’s great.
>>
>
> IMO, LibreWolf pretty much is Firefox without the problematic bits.
> It’s been my default browser for several years, and I’m very satisfied
> with it.

Perfect, then.

>> As the person who made the changes, it would be great if you could
>> pinpoint things that had to be changed compared to ‘icecat’. What
>> phases or flags differ?  What phases can be factorized?
>>
> This work isn’t based on the icecat package, but on the firefox-esr
> package from nonguix.  The duplication I refer to is two small helper
> functions, `runpath-of' and `runpaths-of-input', totaling nine lines
> of code; they’re flagged with a comment in the patch.  As mentioned in
> the cover letter, I’m happy to extract these, I just don’t know where
> they ought to be placed.  They’re defined inside a lambda in a gexp,
> which sounds like it may be challenging to put somewhere accessible to
> both packages.
>
> Skimming the icecat package, not many of the build steps are shared
> with librewolf, and factoring the commonalities out would IMO result
> in overly complex, brittle, hard to maintain code that’s worse than
> the slight duplication between the two packages.  If there’s a strong
> feeling that they must be accounted for, I’ll give it a try, but I
> don’t believe that it’s the best option.

Yeah, you’re right that factorizing can be a bad idea when misplaced, so
let’s keep it that way.

I’ll take a closer look at the patches if nobody beats me at it!

Thanks,
Ludo’.