On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 9:59 AM Matt Connell (Gmail) <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, 2021-11-30 at 09:18 -0500, Rich Freeman wrote: > > A little background for the curious, and I'll just try to stick to the > > factual narrative and what the main opinions are: > > Gentoo is in an awkward position here: as was discussed in the bug, it > isn't simply a matter of setting libpng[-apng] by default, letting > Mozilla bundle their own libpng, and moving on with life. Other > programs on Gentoo systems, built against libpng over the years with > apng support, will suddenly *not* have it, and this situation could > cause problems and data loss for users. >
So now we're getting more into personal opinion. Those same users will suffer data loss if they open the same files on any other linux distro or likely windows/OSX/etc versions of the same software, because they don't use the patched version of libpng. I certainly don't have any objection to a heads-up news item when the change hits, but do we REALLY want to package system libraries that have behavior that is unique to Gentoo, and not the same as even what the upstream devs expect? We had a similar situation when it came out that our version of an Etherium client (I think that was it) had some custom patches by default, which were eventually turned off by default. The patches were somewhat controversial, and while I think anybody should be free to use them (they didn't create compatibility issues with the blockchain per se), it is surprising behavior. This is the same reason that we don't go putting affiliate links into search boxes on our browsers like many distros do (which can be a significant source of revenue). Sure, we could patch our browsers to basically give Gentoo a small cut anytime a user searches for anything, or charge search engines to be the default in all our packaged browsers, but it just isn't the way we normally do things (and those changes are IMO more transparent anway - at least the affiliate links are). Now, if somebody wants to run that patch by upstream libpng and it shows signs of getting accepted then by all means hold off until that is settled. The goal is to stick to upstream, and we can always release the change ahead of them (in this case more than a decade ahead of them). Really though this issue has been going on forever so there is no reason to go breaking stuff until a final decision is made and we can do an orderly transition. I think the change is a good one, but it would have been a good one in 2010 too. -- Rich
