[Fedora-packaging] Is it time to allow Chromium in Fedora?

[Neal Gompa]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 10:11:39PM -0400, Gary Gatling wrote:
> > > I realize we have our guidelines and we're not Debian, Suse or
> Ubuntu...
> > > and that's a good thing.  But, if we're making exceptions for Firefox
> > > because of it's popularity shouldn't we do the same for Chromium.
> > I agree with Gerald. If there are exceptions for firefox due to
> popularity
> > then chromium deserves the same bundling exceptions. Otherwise we are not
> > being fair.
>
> It's important to note that "popularity" is not the sole reason for
> exceptions for Firefox. Overall, everyone should review the existing
> discussion in the guidelines about bundling exceptions and consider how
> this might fit in (possibly including revisions if they make sense):
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries#Some_reasons_you_might_be_granted_an_exception
>
> --
> Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> Fedora Project Leader
> --
> packaging mailing list
> packaging at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging


​While it is true that Chromium does indeed bundle a lot more than Firefox
does, I think they've also been putting in quite a bit of work into
actually solving this problem[0]. To be absolutely fair to Chromium, they
recognized the issue very quickly after they started making Linux releases.
On top of the fact that Chromium development moves extremely quickly[1] and
they appear to be quite responsive on security issues and work hard to
design the application to be secure in itself[2]. If I remember correctly,
it was Chromium's rapid development pace that triggered Firefox's own
development practices to change[3].

I think that it's hard for us to continue to ignore Chromium, too. Despite
everything, Chrome is preferred web browser by Fedorans second to Firefox,
and not by a wide margin with Google+ users and a somewhat wide margin with
Facebook users[4]. I imagine the lack of Chromium in Fedora is pretty much
the reason for low usage and Firefox being default the reason for it
remaining the top browser.

If there's a huge stopper of some kind, we should engage with the Chromium
folks more directly on solving it. I don't know exactly what that would
involve, but we should do something about it, I think.

[0]: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=28287
[1]: https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel​
[2]: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security
[3]:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2506843/desktop-apps/firefox-follows-chrome-lead--eyes-faster-releases.html
[4]:
https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/most-popular-web-browsers-among-fedora-users/


-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
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