today's git broke winetricks gecko :-(

Ove Kaaven ovek at arcticnet.no
Mon Nov 16 17:52:53 CST 2009


Jacek Caban skrev:
> Ove Kaaven wrote:
>> Jacek Caban skrev:
>>  
>>> Well, I hope that a side effect of installation during wineprefix
>>> creation is that it will force packagers to package gecko <g>
>>>     
>>
>> You can't *force* the creation of packages which would likely fail to
>> meet the requirements for inclusion into Debian's main archive. Even if
>> I didn't think the package's build system is a problem, the ftpmasters
>> likely would.
>>   
> 
> Then I can't see better solution for Debian users than downloading Gecko
> on wineprefix creation. It's not perfect, but we don't have much choice.

It really should be optional. Making it mandatory for a program to go
out on the Internet, download 'untrusted' binaries, and then running
them, without the user actually having (and knowing) a reason for the
program to do this, might be too much for some security-conscious (and
spyware-hating) people to handle. Debian packagers have been forced to
turn off that kind of automatic behaviour before. Hence, it's possible
that downloading Gecko on wineprefix creation is not a solution for
Debian users at all, and that any attempt at this will result in a
release-critical bug (with a "security problem" tag to boot, claiming "a
dns spoof could mean someone could control your computer" etc) requiring
this to be turned off in the Debian package.

(It is actually for similar reasons that binaries must be buildable on a
clean system (say, a build daemon), without any special (non-free) tools
or sourceless libraries. Magic libshell32.a in the source package fails
this requirement, and so does usage of non-free cabinet.dll to make cab
file.)

Maybe I could ask on debian-devel if there's a good way to handle this,
maybe someone can come up with a good answer beyond the typical
"upstream developers suck", or at least agree that a kludgy package
might be acceptable in this case. (I'd need some time to prepare
something to ask, though.)

But in any case, I really don't think Gecko should be any less optional
than, say, OpenGL, lcms, or ALSA/OSS/etc, without which Wine will reduce
functionality (even at runtime, not only compile time), but still allow
programs that don't need that functionality to work. You don't need CUPS
to run games and you don't need OpenGL to run Office, why should you
need Gecko for anything that won't ever do any HTML rendering? There's
often much to be said for only installing what you need... and some
people like that. (Wasn't there a reason Gentoo was popular?)




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