Package: flashplugin-nonfree
Version: 1:3.7
Followup-For: Bug #851066
Dear Maintainer,
This note is more for followers of this bug than the maintainer.
I decided to spend some non-trivial time to try and craft a patch
that would skip downloading and checking the little information blobs from
~bartm's account, thereby removing the dependency on updates from ~bartm.
After a little while, I concluded that this approach would be nearly
impossible to solve in the general case.
The fundamental problem is that Adobe can't be relied upon to
provide a consistent URL for downloading the Flash tarball. ~bartm's
solution to this issue appears to have been to extract crucial metadata from
the most current Linux download on Adobe's site (presumably by hand), place
them in a small text file along with some SHA512 hashes, and then GPG-sign
the file.
As a consequence, the files pulled from ~bartm's account contain
crucial metadata that the update-flashplugin-nonfree script needs to locate
and download the plugin from Adobe's site. Obviously, it is impossible to
parse Adobe's Web pages at runtime, as they rely heavily (and unnecesarily)
on dynamic HTML and JavaScript; and Adobe's download directories don't
enumerate -- you either give it exactly the right URL, or you get a 404.
The next thing I'm going to try is to add an option to unpack and
install an already-downloaded Flash tar file. Not nearly as seamless, but
far better than people doing it by hand.
Schwab
-- Package-specific info:
Debian version: 9.0
Architecture: amd64
Package version: 1:3.7
Adobe Flash Player version: LNX 24,0,0,186
MD5 checksums:
a618a20ef0bf4f463960134486a2ed7b
/var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree/flash_player_npapi_linux.x86_64.tar.gz
29c85bc8504422120cf89702986ff8e1
/var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree/get-upstream-version.pl
82cd4f82b2023fad1d43092de8e002a7
/var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree/install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz
52d5e951bafcdb493d1a980a62c0f80e
/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so
Alternatives:
flash-mozilla.so - auto mode
link best version is /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so
link currently points to
/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so
link flash-mozilla.so is /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so
/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so - priority 50
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 34 Aug 4 2016
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so -> /etc/alternatives/flash-mozilla.so
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so: symbolic link to
/etc/alternatives/flash-mozilla.so
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64
(x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages flashplugin-nonfree depends on:
ii binutils 2.28-4
ii ca-certificates 20161130
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.60
ii gnupg 2.1.18-6
ii gnupg2 2.1.18-6
ii libatk1.0-0 2.22.0-1
ii libcairo2 1.14.8-1
ii libcurl3-gnutls 7.52.1-5
ii libfontconfig1 2.11.0-6.7+b1
ii libfreetype6 2.6.3-3.1
ii libgcc1 1:6.3.0-14
ii libglib2.0-0 2.50.3-2
ii libgtk2.0-0 2.24.31-2
ii libnspr4 2:4.12-6
ii libnss3 2:3.26.2-1
ii libpango1.0-0 1.40.5-1
ii libstdc++6 6.3.0-14
ii libx11-6 2:1.6.4-3
ii libxext6 2:1.3.3-1+b2
ii libxt6 1:1.1.5-1
ii wget 1.19.1-3
flashplugin-nonfree recommends no packages.
Versions of packages flashplugin-nonfree suggests:
pn firefox-esr <none>
ii fonts-dejavu 2.37-1
pn hal-flash <none>
pn iceweasel <none>
pn konqueror-nsplugins <none>
ii ttf-mscorefonts-installer 3.6
pn ttf-xfree86-nonfree <none>
-- no debconf information
