Dear all,
I have been surprised that - despite their prominence - projects like VirtualBox and Chrome (the open source version, built directly from Chromium) have not been packaged for Fedora. I might be interested in doing this, and just wanted to know if there are any legal hurdles to it being done, in case that is the reason it has not been done yet?
Best,
Christopher
Hello.
2011/12/18 Christopher Svanefalk christopher.svanefalk@gmail.com:
Dear all,
I have been surprised that - despite their prominence - projects like VirtualBox and Chrome (the open source version, built directly from Chromium) have not been packaged for Fedora. I might be interested in doing this, and just wanted to know if there are any legal hurdles to it being done, in case that is the reason it has not been done yet?
VirtualBox requires kernel module which is prohibited in Fedora. Chromium is just too complex and too unstable (in terms of API interface to the 3rd party libs).
I personally advise you to stay away from both of them.
On 12/18/2011 04:46 AM, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:
Dear all,
I have been surprised that - despite their prominence - projects like VirtualBox and Chrome (the open source version, built directly from Chromium) have not been packaged for Fedora. I might be interested in doing this, and just wanted to know if there are any legal hurdles to it being done, in case that is the reason it has not been done yet?
WRT Chromium, I have a Fedora package in a personal repo here:
http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium-stable/fedora-16/SRPMS/
Unmodified, the bundled copy of ffmpeg would be a legal blocker for Chromium, but that package has the ffmpeg implementation separated out and all the legally troublesome material removed.
The reasons why that package is not in Fedora proper are documented here:
http://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html
~tom
== Fedora Project
On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
On 12/18/2011 04:46 AM, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:
Dear all,
I have been surprised that - despite their prominence - projects like VirtualBox and Chrome (the open source version, built directly from Chromium) have not been packaged for Fedora. I might be interested in doing this, and just wanted to know if there are any legal hurdles to it being done, in case that is the reason it has not been done yet?
WRT Chromium, I have a Fedora package in a personal repo here:
http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium-stable/fedora-16/SRPMS/
Unmodified, the bundled copy of ffmpeg would be a legal blocker for Chromium, but that package has the ffmpeg implementation separated out and all the legally troublesome material removed.
The debian chromium package uses system libraries (including ffmpeg). You could take a look at the debian/rules file in the package to see how that's done, and possibly use that to create a fedora port: http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/chromium-browser.html
The reasons why that package is not in Fedora proper are documented here:
Debian backports security fixes to the 6.x branch. Perhaps it would be fortuitous to work together on a jointly supportable chromium "stable" version across distros as is done for "LTS" kernels now.
Best wishes, Mike
On 12/19/2011 05:09 PM, Michael Gilbert wrote:
The debian chromium package uses system libraries (including ffmpeg). You could take a look at the debian/rules file in the package to see how that's done, and possibly use that to create a fedora port: http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/chromium-browser.html
I would be very surprised if Debian had managed to patch out all the bundled libraries within Chromium, unless they have been aggressively applying the changes that Google has made to its copies to the Debian system libs. The items which can be removed have been removed in my copy already.
~tom
== Fedora Project
-
Christopher Svanefalk -
Michael Gilbert -
Peter Lemenkov -
Tom Callaway