Re: Anyone looking at gnash?

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2014 at 10:56:38PM -0700, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> Hello,
> I've been poking at gnash on and off, in hopes of having some way to view
> Flash on Alpine.
> So far, the problem that I know of is it insists on building a malloc that
> supports mallinfo (which is used _very_ extensively in gnash).

What does it need mallinfo for? I suspect you can just provide a fake
one that gives some estimates based on /proc, or rip it out
alltogether.

> This is jemalloc, where I've found 3 issues already:

The fourth issue is much bigger: replacing malloc is UB and does not
work, especially not on musl. :-)

Trying to make jemalloc work is going to be a dead-end. And I don't
see how a plug-in could think it could replace malloc anyway, even on
systems that (attempt to) allow it. As a plugin, it (or at least the
part that works as a loadable module) has to use whatever malloc is
already there in the process that loaded it (the web browser).

Anyway, back to the point: just fixing gnash to eliminate this
requirement is the direction you want to take.

BUT:

If you don't have an aversion to using the flash player binary, it's
reported to work with musl with a minimum amount of hackery to get it
to load. I'm going to try to get the user who's worked on this to
document the process and post it somewhere. Supposedly he's used it
successfully with both Chromium and Firefox on x86_64 Alpine.

Rich