Is it time to allow Chromium in Fedora?

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2015-08-11 at 14:54 -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
> I think if we're willing to grant such an exception to Firefox, we 
> should be willing to extend the same to Chromium. That is, of course, 
> provided that we can actively work towards cutting away at bundled 
> libraries and getting the engine switched from FFmpeg to GStreamer. 
> Right now, the effort to switch from ffmpeg to GStreamer is being 
> done largely by Samsung, and I think that variant of Chromium is much 
> more appealing due to the pluggable codec framework in GStreamer. I'd 
> rather not have Fedora ship Chromium with a gimped ffmpeg if we 
> didn't have to, but it would be acceptable if using Samsung's efforts 
> to offer GStreamer support isn't appealing right now and that the 
> bundled ffmpeg libraries are split out into a subpackage.

Unfortunately I would not count on Samsung's work to be upstreamed, as
Google will never use it. The GStreamer folks are hoping for it to be
upstreamed but acknowledge there is no chance it will be built by
default. This is an optimistic hope; it is not unlikely that it will
need to be maintained out-of-tree indefinitely. In this case, it would
be better to use Samsung's Chrome as our upstream, rather than
Google's.

Still, I think the bundling exceptions are reasonable. In particular,
there is no reason for Firefox to receive exceptions if Chromium does
not. (The justification for Firefox is "active security team"; Chrome
has that too.)