Re: [PRQ#59191] Deletion Request for widevine Rejected

[Bart De Vries]

Hi,


















Best regards,
Bart

On 30/04/2024 01:55, Muflone wrote:

The chromium-widevine package only covers chromium and chromium-derivatives (and only x86_64), as evidenced by it being installed into `/usr/lib/chromium` where (only) chromium will find it automatically. As the pinned comment for chromium-widevine already mentions, this is not strictly needed anymore, since most browsers these days are able to download the widevine libs automatically from google on first use, and install them into the user profile directory in `/home/user`. The unique thing about this package is that it can install the widevine binaries in a central location in `/opt`, and will register the libs with chromium and firefox to use them from that central location with no user setup required. This avoids having multiple copies for each browser and user. NB: This can be expanded to other browsers as well. I've been meaning to add automatic Vivaldi registering but have not found the time yet. Browsers like Angelfish and Falkon and apps like kodi can also be made to recognize the central lib with a few manual steps. Note that, similar to e.g. spotify, this package can never be incorporated into a main package repository since it's pulling in closed-source copyrighted libs that don't allow redistributing but are allowed to be downloaded directly by the users. I know it's offtopic, but the other unique capability is that this adds additional support for ARM. Google don't serve linux ARM widevine binaries from their main website, so no browsers are able to retrieve the addon on first use. This package retrieves the publicly available binaries for/from chromeos which also work with plain linux on ARM. PS: The OP mentioned that this package is not needed because firefox will automatically download the libs on first use. This is true, but - as mentioned above - the same holds for chromium, so following that reasoning, all widevine related packages should be removed from AUR. PS2: The version numbering comment is a valid point: the version number of the most recent widevine lib differs between platforms (ask google why). I should change the package to use the most recent x86_64 version number as the main one. (Similar to git packages, the current PKGBUILD will update to the correct version number on build. So the actually installed package will have the correct version number for the respective platform.)

Hello

Request #59191 has been Rejected by Muflone [1]:

see previous package maintainer answer

[1]https://aur.archlinux.org/account/Muflone/

@Muflone, what do you mean exactly?

The package is not buildable and installable on Arch Linux due to missing a 
dependency, 'glibc-widevine'. That was an ARM-only older, patched variant of 
glibc.

Also it is not true that this package offers anything useful on Arch Linux. 
Repo's Chromium and Firefox already has widevine support, and 
AUR/chromium-widevine offers this runtime for other executables.

The package widevine builds in chroot and installs fine in Arch Linux.

The glibc-widevine dependency is for ARM builds only.

Best regards

And what is the rationale of keeping this duplicate of AUR/chromium-widevine?

@Bart De Vries






Best regards

--
Fabio Castelli aka Muflone

would be kind to explain how the widevine package does "*more* than chromium-widevine" and "adds *unique* features for firefox" as your previous reply? Is there some reason to keep this package? How this differs from chromium-widevine ?

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