xulrunner 2.0 in rawhide (F15) bundles several system libs

[Sven Lankes]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 10:09:32AM -0700, Christopher Aillon wrote:

>> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=577653

>> Looking at how rigorous new packages with bundled libs are fought we
>> should really stop shipping firefox and start shipping Iceweasel.

> I personally don't care what we call it.  

Great.

> I'm not going to start breaking funny cat videos just to meet
> packaging ideals on a deadline. I'd rather deal with all you guys
> complaining on fedora-devel and in fesco tickets than the influx of
> bugs if I started breaking shit. It's bad enough that there are more
> bugs than we can handle. 

I'm not worried too much about a library being system or not. What I'm
worried about is twofold:

1. Established packagers of high-profile packages get to do what they
   want with fedora packages while small-scale packagers of low-profile
   packages get told to bugger off if they cannot make their packages
   use system libs (zsync anyone?).

   Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can see none of the chosen ff
   comitters has actually asked fesco to grant an exception for libvpx,
   right? Now that the topic has come up there is talk in the ticket
   that the exception should be granted but that cannot feel right to
   anyone, can it?

2. The combination of the Mozilla Trademark issue combined with the
   strict handling of patches by (corporate|distro)-maintainers (I don't
   think that this is a RH/Fedora issue - same with Canonical/Ubuntu)
   makes me feel uneasy about ff being called Free sofware.

(And yes - I am aware that the other relevant floss-browser is much
worse than mozilla wrt. bundling libs and using forked libs).

> Besides, Mozilla has a good track record of allowing system libs
> after things settle down, and I have no doubt that we'll get these at
> some point.

This is not what the bug report I quoted says. Unless "Sorry, no." has a
connotation of "but we'll revisit once dust has settled" that I'm just
not aware of as a non native speaker.

Also the bug is not about _using_ the system lib it's just about
allowing the user to build against it.

> From Mozilla's perspective, they could:
> 1. Do what they are doing now, temporarily not allow a few new
> system libs, waiting until they get banged into shape and *then*
> enable system libs (down the road).
> 2. Bang on the code in private and wait until it meets every Fedora
> packaging guideline, etc, until committing to the upstream
> repository, so we all get to wait for all of the cool shit that's
> happening.

3. Add the patch to their system that would allow people to build
against a system lib.

-- 
sven === jabber/xmpp: sven at lankes.net