Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar [LWN.net]

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 20, 2012 21:45 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar by tzafrir
Parent article: Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

He still has a legitimate point. If Firefox does nothing with TIFFs, why does it require libtiff? If the answer is that GTK contains functions which call libtiff, that's not a good enough reason if those functions are never used by Firefox. Fixing this would require more conditional compilation and/or looser, run-time linking of dependencies. Unfortunately both those things multiply the number of possible configurations and hence places for bugs to hide.

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Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 20, 2012 23:25 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

Have you considered the fact that it's possible that internally one or more of ff's dependencies uses libtiff for something?

Or -- more probable -- the fact that the ports system has a bug (because it does not have USE flags like portage or something) that does not let you compile those dependencies without libtiff?

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 20, 2012 23:25 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Libtiff is not required by Firefox (Firefox). It is required by oy one of the GTK+ packages. GTK+ would actually work just fine without TIFF support. But I figure that the maintainers of the GTK+ port in FreeBSD figured it would be a nice idea for GTK+ programs to have TIFF support.

So you could potentially have two copies of GTK+ on the system. But that would in fact involve a longer build time. Assuming you do want TIFF support in some other GTK+ programs, why not have it just enabled in GTK+?

So either fix it the "Ubuntu" way (build GTK+ with TIFF support for everybody) or the "Gentoo" way (build GTK+ without TIFF support for everybody. Keeping multiple copies increases your overall build time (not to mention other types of overheads).

Oh, and do you mean that Firefox (and Chromium, likewise) have this nice habit of not reusing system components? Well, this is a know issue. In the works, I guess.

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 21, 2012 1:52 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Supporting TIFF in a Web browser is simply a bad idea. There's no important use-case which isn't just as well served by other image formats. Exposing TIFF support means that some site might come to depend on it and now the Web platform has just a bit more unnecessary complexity. Also, you'll have increased the security attack surface for no good reason.

Firefox can use system codecs, that's not the issue here.

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 21, 2012 23:10 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Yup, the problem is that the build process tends towards maximalism, since there is only one official build for GTK and it has to include any feature that anybody might want. Any work done by upstream to make dependencies optional is neutralized by the packager, who has the choice of building with libfoo as a hard dependency, or not at all.