OpenBSD Journal

p2k16 Hackathon Report: landry@ on mozilla ports

Contributed by tj on from the mozillian-things-to-do dept.

The next report in our p2k16 series is from Landry Breuil, who writes:

For once we had a hackathon in France, so travel should be simple... turns out, at the last minute the past week i had engaged myself in a motorbike rally race, taking place in Corsica on the weekend right before the hackathon. Driving to south of france on Thursday, night boat to corsica, two days racing, then boat back to the mainland, then driving all night to come back to my place, change backpack, sleep 1h, and hop on the cheap bus from my place to Nantes. Arrived there at 21h, i was of course totally destroyed from the 30h trip and after meeting the others for a heavy meal, i crashed early to bed...

The next day, i finally realized where i was and what was i supposed to do here! As usual i had some smallish Xfce updates to work on, then spent most of the rest of the hackathon dealing with Mozilla 46 updates, which this time were entangled - so they deserved special care:

  • Thunderbird had to be updated from 38 to 45, but i had been testing the betas for the past months and it was going to be flawless. Upstream had enabled updates too and they were confident about it..

  • Firefox-ESR had to be updated from 38 to 45 too, as the esr38 branch was going to die soon.. patches had to be shuffled around.

  • And Firefox itself was going from 45 to 46, with a major change i've been awaiting since a while.. upstream had switched to Gtk+3 by default! I also had been testing firefox with Gtk+3 since a good while, and it was working really nicely - of course last-minute changes to deal with Gtk+ 3.20 were needed, since we're often ahead of some Linux distros, we get to test as early adopters.. but i found nice patches in fedora bugzilla, courtesy of one of the Red Hat employees that work upstream on Gtk+3 integration.

  • And since robert@ had enabled bits of WebRTC in Chromium, i also decided to enable WebRTC in our Firefox. It doesn't work 100%, sound is not really here, video works, data channel works, it needs more love.. but i can't dedicate time for it those days, so i hope enabling it will somehow drag interest from users to tinker with it, and *debug* it!

I also took a while to update/enable lots of new langpacks for the Mozillas, often a boring task, but our Acholi, Assamese, Sorbian, Ligurian and Malay users (among lots of others) will find their browser translated in their native language!

Finally, because sometime you have to get some work done upstream, i spent a day porting some of the Xfce panel plugins from Gtk+2 to Gtk+3, which is an ongoing effort in the past year, and help is always welcome in Xfce land if you want to do some GUI/toolkit work different from your daily porting tasks on OpenBSD..

On the side, i worked a bit with danj@ to review some of his submissions, and enjoyed lots of coffees and chats with our host gilles@ who had managed to organize us an awesome hackathon, with lots of very good ideas for restaurants and bars.. so thanks gilles@ and Aymeric for the hosting!

Thanks for your report Landry!

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (198.148.217.50) on

    Yay for WebRTC! Thank you for your efforts.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (84.170.132.130) on

    Hi,

    did mlarkin approach mozilla porters at all regarding putting firefox into a virtual vmm? I read that he was there and though it might have been a great opportunity to do so, or at least touch on the subject of browsers inside vmm. The idea dates back to a hint of slides from asiabsdcon I believe. Personally I think the browser has the highest attack surface on an openbsd workstation and I fear for my ssh keys at times. Then again it would be sucky not to have a browser so I thank you muchly for the efforts!

    Comments
    1. By foo (151.67.68.131) on


      You can also try another browser such as Midori (www/midori in ports)

    2. By Anonymous Coward (192.35.17.16) on

      > Personally I think the browser has the highest attack surface on an openbsd workstation and I fear for my ssh keys at times. Then again it would be sucky not to have a browser so I thank you muchly for the efforts!

      I run my browser as different user, so at least it has no easy access to my ssh key. But i worry about workarounds, like X11 bugs/features.

      But better than having no browser, indeed.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (84.170.156.46) on

        > > Personally I think the browser has the highest attack surface on an openbsd workstation and I fear for my ssh keys at times. Then again it would be sucky not to have a browser so I thank you muchly for the efforts!
        >
        > I run my browser as different user, so at least it has no easy access to my ssh key. But i worry about workarounds, like X11 bugs/features.
        >
        > But better than having no browser, indeed.

        I did that too for a while, but I ran into copy/paste problems from/to browser. I'm wondering do you have those problems too with your browser as a different user? If not what are you doing different?

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (193.77.50.22) on

          > I did that too for a while, but I ran into copy/paste problems from/to browser. I'm wondering do you have those problems too with your browser as a different user? If not what are you doing different?

          I have a browser running in a separate Xephyr instance. I am using a script based on the 'xsel' command (package xsel) and have specified a key combination that copies primary selection from/to the browser.

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