On Mon, Jun 11, 2018 at 10:43 AM Tom Callaway <tcallawa@redhat.com> wrote:
Background:

I made the original v8 Fedora package many moons ago, when I was more
optimistic about the possibility of separating the useful components
inside of chromium. Since that point, it has become clear that while v8
is useful software, the following facts are also true:

1. The v8 upstream is entirely disinterested in the concept of
maintaining any sort of ABI/API consistency between releases.
2. The v8 that is used in chromium is not necessarily compatible with
the upstream v8, as they have a history of picking and choosing code
changes (and even applying chromium specific changes locally).
3. Virtually all consumers of v8 (including chromium) take a git
checkout (not a specific one, just whatever they decided to code to) and
use that revision, often creating a local fork of v8 from that revision,
as they are either unwilling or unable to track v8 upstream.
4. Since v8 has no concept of a "stable" release that I can see, they
simply do security fixes to the master branch, which, combined with the
code changing violently, makes it very difficult to backport security fixes.
 

For all of these same reasons, the Node.js SIG opted to carry a bundled copy of v8 in that package as well. I think we should move to have v8 considered to be a copylib for all reasonable purposes within Fedora.