Jacek Caban skrev:
Ove Kaaven wrote:
Jacek Caban skrev:
Well, I hope that a side effect of installation during wineprefix creation is that it will force packagers to package gecko <g>
You can't *force* the creation of packages which would likely fail to meet the requirements for inclusion into Debian's main archive. Even if I didn't think the package's build system is a problem, the ftpmasters likely would.
Then I can't see better solution for Debian users than downloading Gecko on wineprefix creation. It's not perfect, but we don't have much choice.
It really should be optional. Making it mandatory for a program to go out on the Internet, download 'untrusted' binaries, and then running them, without the user actually having (and knowing) a reason for the program to do this, might be too much for some security-conscious (and spyware-hating) people to handle. Debian packagers have been forced to turn off that kind of automatic behaviour before. Hence, it's possible that downloading Gecko on wineprefix creation is not a solution for Debian users at all, and that any attempt at this will result in a release-critical bug (with a "security problem" tag to boot, claiming "a dns spoof could mean someone could control your computer" etc) requiring this to be turned off in the Debian package.
(It is actually for similar reasons that binaries must be buildable on a clean system (say, a build daemon), without any special (non-free) tools or sourceless libraries. Magic libshell32.a in the source package fails this requirement, and so does usage of non-free cabinet.dll to make cab file.)
Maybe I could ask on debian-devel if there's a good way to handle this, maybe someone can come up with a good answer beyond the typical "upstream developers suck", or at least agree that a kludgy package might be acceptable in this case. (I'd need some time to prepare something to ask, though.)
But in any case, I really don't think Gecko should be any less optional than, say, OpenGL, lcms, or ALSA/OSS/etc, without which Wine will reduce functionality (even at runtime, not only compile time), but still allow programs that don't need that functionality to work. You don't need CUPS to run games and you don't need OpenGL to run Office, why should you need Gecko for anything that won't ever do any HTML rendering? There's often much to be said for only installing what you need... and some people like that. (Wasn't there a reason Gentoo was popular?)