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

On Sat, Sep 28, 2024 at 6:05 AM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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.

This patch appears to be very relevant:
<https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland/blob/master/components/desktop/firefox/patches/Bug1888396.patch>.
It provides the big- and little-endian dance.

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

Jeff