[arch-general] Firefox without signature checking

[Kyle Terrien]

On 01/02/2016 05:24 PM, Magnus Therning wrote:
> The larger, and very philosophical question is "How user un-friendly can
> upstream make it before Arch decides to *not* package as upstream
> intends?" (Answering this requires keeping in mind that Arch users are
> unlikely to fall squarely into the target group of upstream.)

This is a very good question to ask imho.  In a perfect world, we would
just fork and be done with it.  However, it is not a perfect world.
Forking requires time and effort, and it generally kills the software.
(Here I am with several installs that have both Firefox and Pale Moon
for compatibility reasons.)

Most Arch users definitely do not fall into Mozilla's target group (an
imaginary "average Joe" as I like to call it).  We made this decision
when we decided to install Arch as opposed to Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, or
any other distro that does a decent job of configuring itself
automatically.

In 2015, we have seen a surprisingly large push for user un-friendliness
in general.  Firefox proposing add-on signing and removing features such
as "complete" themes were just a couple examples.  The GNOME folks are
talking about breaking GTK themes again.  I have lost track of how many
"statically linked" QT libraries (e.g. bundled with Dropbox) that are
completely broken.  And in the world of other OSes, the Windows 10
release basically added spyware at the OS level to millions of users'
PCs.

So, the real question is where do you draw the line when something is
un-friendly?  And what do you do when the line is crossed?

--Kyle Terrien

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