On Tue, 09 Jul 2019 17:59:41 -0400 Mark wrote: > I honestly don't know how to engage with IceCat upstream
as i mentioned in my previous post, we had some discussion a few months ago about setting up a communication channel for anyone interested in maintenance of liberated mozilla browsers to use [1] youre right that icecat is usually not so troublesome and doesnt require many or any extra patches at the distro level; but the rolling mozilla browser is a real chore for most releases - im not sure if guix has a rolling firefox; but the redundant efforts are more significant with those, if only because of the frequency as a rough guage of the complexity of patching icecat vs the upstream mozilla, the parabola build script for icecat is about 200 LOC, and the build script for iceweasel is about 600 LOC the idea was to compare the patches that each distro is applying (icecat, abrowser, iceweasel) and see if they could be unified into a patch package that anyone could download to liberate their own rolling browser - more importantly though, to discuss and work over the hurdles that need to be overcome with each new version, which are probably much the same ones for each distro - at the end of each ESR cycle, whatever experience regarding the rolling releases, that has accumulated on the gnuzilla-dev list, would surely ease in the next icecat release we havent actually started at it; but it was the current maintainer of iceweasel who asked me to setup this sort of collaboration with ruben - if it could help packagers get these browsers out more quickly, that would please users greatly - if there is one program that people care the most about it being up-to-date, it is the web browser - parabola usually gets the "out-of-date' flag on iceweasel within hours of a new mozilla release; but it takes at least a day to build for all arches, even in the simplest cases; sometimes weeks for a particularly troublesome release - lately, i686 for example, has been getting more and more difficult to support at all [1]: https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2018-December/007072.html -- http://gnuzilla.gnu.org