On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 2:11 PM Dario Faggioli
Hello,
So, I was giving some thoughts at the matter in the subject of this email, and here's what I came up with.
Personally, I do use a few extensions; not that many, but a few. I also don't think I have spoken with any GNOME user that has not needed and/or installed at least one.
Therefore, I'd say it's quite important to have a way to install them, ideally one that is available right after install, without having to fiddle with and tweak the system.
Right now we're not shipping any browser. we were shipping Firefox, but got rid of it, since there is a Flatpak. But the flatpak can't handle the extensions.
The issue is known, is being debated and maybe will even be fixed at some point. But that may take a while. Some links:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1633206
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621763
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/g2emg7/extensionsgnomeorg_firefox_fl...
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/firefox-flatpak-on-flathub-beta/17878...
The last one contains a workaround, but I don't see it as something that we can easily (at some point) put in place like by default, or document and expect users to understand and follow it, TBH.
As an alternative, there's this app, available as Flatpak, but it does not handle the installing part of the extension workflow, so it's kind of useless for the purposes of this discussion:
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.Extensions
The only solution I currently see, is to do it from a browser installed in the system, with RPMs. And on that ground, I think we should go back and add one, by default.
This of course would apply to the GNOME flavor only. I mean, if we want it in KDE too, for whatever other reason, I don't personally object or anything, I just don't think it'd be necessary there.
Thoughts so far?
Well, it gets trickier. In fact, if you're tempted to say "Ok, let's go back to including Firefox as an RPM by default", then think about this: what happens if an user then try to use this version of Firefox that we provide, for access multimedia content that requires the coded that we don't ship and that (typically) are in packman?
Something like <
>. Yeah, well, it does not work. OTOH, on the Firefox from Flathub, of course, it works like a charm. :-/
So now the user is happy, because he/she can install GNOME extensions right away, but is also mad, because he/she needs two Firefox-es installed, if wanting to watch Netflix. :-(
I personally am all but sure about what we should do about all this.
So, again, thoughts? :-)
My perspective would be to ship Firefox as an RPM. Unfortunately, the pitfall we have right now is that we don't have a good mechanism for someone to add codecs to the system. This is a general problem we have to solve at some point, but the particularly nasty issue with Firefox is that we only have one option: Packman. I think this might have been easier to solve if we had a similar arrangement with Cisco[0] to ship OpenH264 codecs to openSUSE users and preload the repo configuration for that on openSUSE systems. We could then have YaST pull it in at install-time. That would fix Firefox for H.264. And combined with fdk-aac-free[1], that would be sufficient to solve this dilemma. Firefox can use both of these to support WebRTC and other web video playback. [0]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenH264 [1]: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/fdk-aac-free -- 真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!