What is required for Debian packaging? (Also, why not merge with Ungoogled)?

[summersab]

I've been using Iridium for over a year, now, and I only recently saw your blog post about Debian builds: https://iridiumbrowser.de/news/2020/02/28/version-2020.01.79

(You might want to put a notice on the downloads page to indicate this issue. I wouldn't have known unless I did some digging).

What is required to make builds for Debian? I've used Debian as my daily OS for 10+ years, but I've never built a deb before. It can't be too complex, and maybe I could figure it out. How can I help?

Lastly, I know that Ungoogled Chromium borrows code from Iridium and you borrow code from them, but would it make sense to join the projects, or is there too much difference between your approaches? In my view, Ungoogled has more popularity (based on stars and activity on GitHub, at least), but Iridium has a much better brand identity, website, etc. From what I understand, Iridium is a bit more locked down than Ungoogled while Ungoogled is simply Chromium minus the Google bits. In short, Iridium goes a few steps further. Perhaps if the projects merged, there could be either two versions available or a first-run wizard that asks users what settings they want to enable/disable.

Just a thought - keep it up!

[doc75]

Is there any script that would help us understand how you build it previously ? That would help us try to build it.

[narcisgarcia]

Two questions: deb building procedure and maintinting packages repository at downloads.iridiumbrowser.de/deb/

[narcisgarcia]

I succeded converting RPM to DEB with Debian 10, but not now with Debian 11 on converting iridium 2021.10:

$ sudo alien --to-deb --scripts iridium-browser-2021.10.95-1.el8.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -i iridium-browser_2021.10.95-2_amd64.deb
$ iridium-browser
/usr/lib64/iridium-browser/iridium-browser: error while loading shared libraries: libevent-2.1.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libevent-2.1.so.7 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libevent-2.1.so.6
$ iridium-browser
/usr/lib64/iridium-browser/iridium-browser: error while loading shared libraries: libwebp.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libwebp.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libwebp.so.7
$ iridium-browser
/usr/lib64/iridium-browser/iridium-browser: error while loading shared libraries: libre2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libre2.so.9 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libre2.so.0
$ iridium-browser 
/usr/lib64/iridium-browser/iridium-browser: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/iridium-browser/iridium-browser: undefined symbol: _ZN3re23RE23Arg12parse_ushortEPKcmPv

I don't know what to do now, and I'd prefer to fully compile and build DEB package.

[narcisgarcia]

Now it still fails with lack of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.6 because available packages in current Stable distribution are: libffi7 -> /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.7 libffi8

[summersab]

It seems like both Iridium and Ungoogled are either dead or dying (which I view as a damned shame - they both have excellent visions, Iridium has an epic name, etc). I was running a severely outdated version of Ungoogled for months as I hoped for a replacement. Then, I did some Duckling and found this: https://foliovision.com/2021/12/privacy-ungoogled-chromium

While I have my qualms with Brave's business model and dislike a lot of the bloat they include, I can't dispute articles like this (there are more).

To be clear, I don't WANT either Iridium or Ungoogled to go the way of the dodo. However, when faced with the current situation...

[narcisgarcia]

Just before death, project developers should make an effort to document their souce processing, modifications and repackaging steps (similar to GNU IceCat). After this, make another effort to make that documentation easy to understand and apply.