Package: flashplugin-nonfree Version: 1:3.7 Followup-For: Bug #851066 Dear Maintainer,
This note is more for followers of this bug than the maintainer. I decided to spend some non-trivial time to try and craft a patch that would skip downloading and checking the little information blobs from ~bartm's account, thereby removing the dependency on updates from ~bartm. After a little while, I concluded that this approach would be nearly impossible to solve in the general case. The fundamental problem is that Adobe can't be relied upon to provide a consistent URL for downloading the Flash tarball. ~bartm's solution to this issue appears to have been to extract crucial metadata from the most current Linux download on Adobe's site (presumably by hand), place them in a small text file along with some SHA512 hashes, and then GPG-sign the file. As a consequence, the files pulled from ~bartm's account contain crucial metadata that the update-flashplugin-nonfree script needs to locate and download the plugin from Adobe's site. Obviously, it is impossible to parse Adobe's Web pages at runtime, as they rely heavily (and unnecesarily) on dynamic HTML and JavaScript; and Adobe's download directories don't enumerate -- you either give it exactly the right URL, or you get a 404. The next thing I'm going to try is to add an option to unpack and install an already-downloaded Flash tar file. Not nearly as seamless, but far better than people doing it by hand. Schwab -- Package-specific info: Debian version: 9.0 Architecture: amd64 Package version: 1:3.7 Adobe Flash Player version: LNX 24,0,0,186 MD5 checksums: a618a20ef0bf4f463960134486a2ed7b /var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree/flash_player_npapi_linux.x86_64.tar.gz 29c85bc8504422120cf89702986ff8e1 /var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree/get-upstream-version.pl 82cd4f82b2023fad1d43092de8e002a7 /var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree/install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz 52d5e951bafcdb493d1a980a62c0f80e /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so Alternatives: flash-mozilla.so - auto mode link best version is /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so link currently points to /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so link flash-mozilla.so is /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so - priority 50 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 34 Aug 4 2016 /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so -> /etc/alternatives/flash-mozilla.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so: symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/flash-mozilla.so -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.0 APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages flashplugin-nonfree depends on: ii binutils 2.28-4 ii ca-certificates 20161130 ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.60 ii gnupg 2.1.18-6 ii gnupg2 2.1.18-6 ii libatk1.0-0 2.22.0-1 ii libcairo2 1.14.8-1 ii libcurl3-gnutls 7.52.1-5 ii libfontconfig1 2.11.0-6.7+b1 ii libfreetype6 2.6.3-3.1 ii libgcc1 1:6.3.0-14 ii libglib2.0-0 2.50.3-2 ii libgtk2.0-0 2.24.31-2 ii libnspr4 2:4.12-6 ii libnss3 2:3.26.2-1 ii libpango1.0-0 1.40.5-1 ii libstdc++6 6.3.0-14 ii libx11-6 2:1.6.4-3 ii libxext6 2:1.3.3-1+b2 ii libxt6 1:1.1.5-1 ii wget 1.19.1-3 flashplugin-nonfree recommends no packages. Versions of packages flashplugin-nonfree suggests: pn firefox-esr <none> ii fonts-dejavu 2.37-1 pn hal-flash <none> pn iceweasel <none> pn konqueror-nsplugins <none> ii ttf-mscorefonts-installer 3.6 pn ttf-xfree86-nonfree <none> -- no debconf information