[HEADUP] FreeBSD Gecko's TODO and plan for future

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Sat, 2009-08-22 at 20:22 +0200, Martin Wilke wrote:
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> Howdy Guys,
> 
> The FreeBSD Gecko Team will let you know what the plans for 
> the future are and on what we are currently working.
> 
> Goals:
> * Removal of mozilla, nvu, xulrunner and firefox2.
> * www/firefox35 should be moved to www/firefox.
> * The options USE_GECKO mozilla nvu xulrunner and firefox will be also removed.
> 
> Background:
>  We have a lot of old stuff on the portstree and it's time to cleanup old stuff.
>      * www/mozilla is 5 year old now, no longer supported by upstream, and
>        has many many vulnerabilities. We can use www/seamonkey.
> 
>      * www/nvu last official release was in 2005, no longer supported, and
>        also some vulnerabilities. We have www/kompozer which also need an
>        update to get this unbroken.
> 
>      * www/xulrunner is old and was replaced by www/libxul. We should not
>        hold any old Gecko stuff. Also it's not longer supported by upstream:
>        https://wiki.mozilla.org/XULRunner:Roadmap
> 
> Problems which we have to solve:
>   Some Gnome ports need www/firefox to build and work, but unfortunately
>   firefox2 isn't longer supported by the Mozilla Foundation. Also
>   www/firefox has a lot of vulnerabilities. We should www/firefox
>   mark FORBIDDEN at this time gives no fixes for the latest securtiy
>   reports.
> 
> We see here 2 ways:
>       1) The Gnome Team (not the FreeBSD Gnome Team) take time and move all his
>          stuff to libxul.

The debate is still on-going (due to a11y concerns), but it looks like
WebKit is going to be the de facto standard in GNOME 2.28.  That should
greatly reduce the number of ports that require Gecko.  As it stands
now, just about all of the GNOME ports build against libxul, and the
firefox Gecko provider can simply be removed.

Joe

-- 
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