Re: About browsers (again) [was Re: Firmware for Broadcom BCM4318 Wireless LAN Controller]

Hello João,

On Sat, 2024-09-28 at 10:36 +0100, João wrote:
> SeaLion is definitely worth considering, but it is not part of the distribution,
> and it would be desirable if Debian PPC (we are talking about big endian PPC,
> and I'm using PPC64 myself) would have a modern featurefull browser available.
> 
> Of course everyone (I should say most people ;)) would want Firefox, but from
> the threads you quote below I was under the impressions that there was little
> hope to get it working, but from Adrian's email on this thread I get the
> impression that it is still worth pursuing?

Oracle ships a current version of Firefox on Solaris SPARC which is a big-endian
target and they have published all of their patches in their Github repository
for the Solaris userland [1].

Thus, someone that is interested in Firefox on big-endian PowerPC should sit down
and take the time to try building a Debian Firefox package with the Oracle patches
applied.

> Would packaging SeaLion in Debian be a worthwhile alternative goal? 

A web browser is a huge potential security thread so packaging and maintaining it
requires a lot of patience and diligence. For that very reason, the Debian FTP
team will most likely reject a SeaLion package if it's submitted unless there is
a dedicated maintainer behind it.

Adrian

> [1] https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland/tree/master/components/desktop/firefox/patches

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   Physicist
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