Re: [PLUG] Mozilla. I Can't Tolerate Intolerance: Need an Alternative

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 4:13 AM, Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org> wrote:
> I've used chrome, but find it's interface too weird.  Opera is not open source,
> (although it's in Gentoo as source so I'm confused).

Opera isn't distributed as source in Gentoo.  The ebuild just fetches
their binary tarball and installs it (managing it via the package
manager).  One of the advantages of the ebuild format is that the
installation script is separated from the
files to be installed, so they can be written even for packages that
Gentoo would not otherwise be able to redistribute.  There are
actually packages in Gentoo for proprietary software - if you run them
when it tries to fetch it just tells you to copy some files from the
CD and put it in the distfile directory.  That is also how stuff like
Java gets handled with the click-through download page - you get
instructions on how to fetch the sources and where to put them, and
then the package manager installs them (and thus can manage the
files).  Binary-distributed packages can get painful if they have a
lot of versioned dependencies - they usually have to be slotted and
well-behaved.  On a side note, why can't upstream maintainers figure
out that if the ABI changes, the SONAME must also change...

Gentoo packages both chrome and chromium, as well as
chrome-binary-plugins and google-talkplugin.  I use chromium, and I
just noticed the chrome-binary-plugins now which I will probably go
ahead and install.the stable slot of it (which ironically is marked
unstable - but you can package.keywords a slot so that is easy
enough).

I also found Chrome a bit odd in the beginning, but honestly I
appreciate the extra screen real-estate now.  You can also re-enable
the window decorations if you want to.  The thing that really annoys
me is that it does client-side rendering with no way to override it,
which makes it horrible over NX/etc.

Rich
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