Trisquel and qtwebengine?

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Lef
Lef
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Joined: 11/20/2021

I note that the Trisquel repos include qtwebengine (http://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel/pool/main/q/qtwebengine-opensource-src/) when it was my understanding that the 'official' stance for FSF distros was to not include it (the infamous https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/1167).

Also what is going to be the action regarding kuserfeedback (https://trisquel.info/en/forum/kde-telemetry-and-triskel-trisquel-kde)? I'm of the opinion that the current KDE telemetry is acceptable (it's opt in).

Thanks all

Legimet
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Joined: 12/10/2013

Here's my stance on the Chromium issue. For years people have been stating that Chromium might contain nonfree software and that it needs to be properly evaluated, but since this evaluation never seems to happen, I think it is reasonable for us to form our own conclusions on the matter.

At this point there is one known nonfree component in Chromium (unrar) that is disabled and removed from Debian as well as the Guix ungoogled-chromium package, and unrar isn't used in qtwebengine anyway.

Besides that, the source packages have some nonfree binaries and various test files that are unused and can be removed with no consequence. Debian and Guix remove these as well, though there were some nonfree binaries/other files accidentally left in the Trisquel source package which have since been removed (edit: this is still a work in progress). The presence of such files is a bug, and if you find any more, please report it. However, I do not consider this a reason to exclude qtwebengine from free distros, because nobody is actually running these binaries, and Trisquel/other free distros make a good faith effort to remove them. The same is true for various other packages besides those based on Chromium.

So far, nobody has been able to point to any nonfree software other than unrar that is actually part of Chromium and compiled in the binary (rather than some files from a test suite that are just present in the source package without doing anything). IMO without any actual evidence of nonfree software, there is no reason to remove a package.