Re: New package: brave-browser-0.56.15

Re: New package: brave-browser-0.56.15

[Logarithmus]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3586 bytes --]

New comment by Logarithmus on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/5511#issuecomment-699783291

Comment:
@Duncaen 
> The proposed package just redistributed vendor provided binaries, there is nothing stopping you from extracting and using the binaries on your own system.

Hmm, I thought that one of the main reasons of using the package manager is the ease of uninstalling any program without having to manually search and delete every file which came with this program.

>Another issue is that if a dependency of the binaries would be updated the package would block void from updating the dependency and we would be required to wait for the vendor to release new binaries linked against the updated dependency, which might take years because they are more likely to use versions used in debian release and not like void the most recent stable release.

Brave devs have been managing to keep up with Chromium releases very closely so far. E. g. latest Brave version 1.14.84 is based on Chromium 85. Thus I think the dependencies should be pretty much the same as of Chromium's, and it won't require much effort to maintain. I understand your concerns, but IMHO there's a lot of exaggeration.

I'd like to point out that Brave is not just a yet another Chromium fork as you may think, it has blazing-fast ad-blocker written in Rust, which is compiled to native code, unlike JavaScript extensions such as uBlock Origin. Also there's built-in tracking protection. You may say "just install Firefox if you want tracking protection". But unfortunately, hardware acceleration in Firefox on Linux is still many steps behind Chromium. Hardware video decoding still doesn't work, recently tried on AMD Radeon HD 7670M and NVIDIA GTX 960, both with OpenGL and WebRender compositors, with all those fancy environment variables, about:config flags and stuff. Browsing in Firefox overall feels sloppy, compared to Chromium. Not to mention browser benchmarks, e. g. Fish Bowl, Firefox is a looser, sad but true.
Maybe it works better with Wayland, but currently Wayland is usable only on GNOME. Any other DE (e. g. KDE) is not an option, it's very unstable and basically unusable.
 
Personally I see 4 options here:
1) Add *brave-browser* package with *restricted=yes* flag and build from source
2) Add *brave-browser* with *restricted* flag and just use vendor provided binaries
3) Add *brave-browser* without *restricted* flag and just use vendor provided binaries
4) Add *brave-browser* without *restricted* flag and build from source
5) Do nothing

Obviously, option 5 is the easiest one.
Options 1 and 2 is are good trade-off between server load and user's convenience (again, using package manager is much more convenient than manually extracting and deleting files).
Option 3 - we should investigate, if Brave's devs allow redistribution of their binaries.
Maintainance-wise, options 3 and 4 aren't so bad as you describe, if you take into account the fast pace of Brave's development (as I've already mentioned, latest Brave is based on latest Chromium, so the dependencies are basically the same).
Option 4 require more performant build server or usage of incremental builds.

As I learnt from the discussions in this repo, lack of computational power on Void's build server is often the main reason to reject new packages. If it's so much of an issue, maybe we just need to get a more performant server? I'm willing for making donations for it, and I'm sure there will be other Void users who will support this initiative.