Stuart Ballard wrote:
> Ben Bucksch wrote:
>
>> *Does anybody know about the Redhat and Debian policies for crypto? All
>> of Mozilla going into non-US wouldn't be good at all.
>
>
> Can't speak for Red Hat (haven't used it in years) but I do know that
> Debian requires all crypto code to be in the non-US section. On the
> other hand, they are generally good at splitting large programs into
> multiple packages, so they would certainly create a mozilla-psm package
> that would just be equivalent of the psm xpi.
We're shipping crypto code with our main distribution. In the past
we've had a US and non-US distribution. That isn't the case any more.
Red Hat 7 includes openssl, openssh, apache with ssl, and some other
crypto packages.
>
> On the third hand[1], the Debian Mozilla maintainer has said (it's even
> in the FAQ) that the way PSM is currently designed makes this horribly
> hard - something to do with trying to alter component.reg at every
> startup? (component.reg is, of course, in a global non-writable
> directory in any sane linux installation). He does provide blizzard's
> jedimindtrick code, so that end-users can work around this, but he has
> apparently been unsuccessful so far in wrapping this up into a
> package[2].
I have the sneaking suspicion that he has wrapped it up into a package
but hasn't been able to release it. I have an rpm for the iPlanet psm
that "just works" but I can't release it either. It's not because of
the crypto regulations it's because the software release from iPlanet is
proprietary and is not to be redistributed.
In the last few days I've been working on a real psm rpm that is built
from the mozilla cvs repository. I've actually got one now:
-rw-r--r-- 1 blizzard cygnus 1230554 Dec 4 13:14
RPMS/i386/mozilla-psm-20001204-0.i386.rpm
but it hasn't been tested by me and only works on Red Hat 7. I need to
make builds that will work on Red Hat 6.x systems as well. If things go
well then I will have psm rpms up on my people page for people to use in
the next two hours.
There have been two reasons why this hasn't happened before:
o Many of the major CA root provider certificates have not been included
in mozilla's cvs repository. This means that even though you can use
SSL as a transport psm will warn you about sites that you try to visit.
Many of those certificates are now checked into mozilla's cvs
repository so it's worth it to spin rpms from there.
o Because psm and nss don't use autoconf and require components from a
different mozilla build tree it's been a real PITA to get it into an
automated build system. That's why it took me about 3 full days of work
to get it to build properly. The src rpm for psm is 32 meg. The binary
rpm is about 1.2 meg.
Brian Ryner has been working on getting psm into mozilla's build system
so it will be built right in. That will make this whole mess unnecessary.
>
> I would strongly suggest that, if the PSM authors have any desire to get
> Mozilla working well and accepted on Unix / Linux / Debian, they try to
> work with the Debian maintainer (his email is [EMAIL PROTECTED] according
> to the changelog.Debian file) to resolve this issue. It won't just be
> Debian that is suffering, just that Debian seems to be the first
> distribution to have tried to package Moz "right" (rather than in a
> world-writable directory or with separate installs for each user).
I showed the debain maintainer how I was doing it in Red Hat's rpms.
I've been installing psm in mozilla's non-world writable directory for
months. :)
>
> Stuart.
>
> [1]What species I must be to have 3 hands is left as an exercise for the
> reader.
> [2]He also seems to have been unable, thus far, to build separate
> -mailnews, -editor, -xmlterm etc packages... but these issues may have
> already been addressed by the existence of regxpcom and regchrome. The
> PSM issue is the most dangerous, though, because this is a *missing*
> component rather than just extra bloat that has to be installed.
It's hard to get editor broken out. If I have time I might break out
mailnews in the near future since it is possible to break that out. Now
that I have working psm rpms and source rpms I'm hoping the debian
maintainer will pick up the build system that I have and start
generating them for debain, too. That's up to him, though.
--Chris
--
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Christopher Blizzard
http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/
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