search

mozilla / web-ext

A command line tool to help build, run, and test web extensions
Mozilla Public License 2.0
2.71k stars 339 forks source link

Create a Debian Package for web-ext #1377

Open ranjithrajv opened 6 years ago

ranjithrajv commented 6 years ago

Proposal to make a debian pacakge to npm module web-ext

Problems now

  1. Installation from untrusted sources is a major source of viruses and other malware.

  2. Without the native packages, we are adding extra tools and processes to keep them installed and maintained. If every application requires learning new tools specific to that language, it cannot scale well.

Advantages of making debian package

  1. In general, any web application (gitlab, diaspora, gnukhata etc) uses javascript for front end. Packaging these libraries makes installation of these applications easy. This is especially important to ensure privacy and control over data for people by moving away from proprietary centralized services like facebook, github etc.

  2. Debian provides signed packages with proper trust path and reproduce-able builds to give confidence about the binaries in use. This is essential for security.

  3. Easy installation, apt install web-ext would be enough as one-step installation if debian package is made.

Tasks

We made a assessment of tasks to be done to make debian package of this, please check this link https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Tasks/web-ext

Rob--W commented 6 years ago

We welcome your efforts to create a package for Debian, but we are not going to actively contribute changes downstream.

If you need some upstream changes related to the library (and not packaging-specific changes/metadata), then feel free to send a pull request.

ranjithrajv commented 6 years ago

Thanks @Rob--W :)

We are a team of Mozilla community in India. We would like to work on some upstream patches as well with support from web-ext team along with making Debian package.

We are planning to train volunteers in our community and make them work packaging npm dependencies and whole web-ext package. Please let us know the right platform to share detailed proposal.

rpl commented 6 years ago

We are a team of Mozilla community in India. We would like to work on some upstream patches as well with support from web-ext team along with making Debian package. We are planning to train volunteers in our community and make them work packaging npm dependencies and whole web-ext package. Please let us know the right platform to share detailed proposal.

@ranjithrajv we are glad to hear that.

In my opinion it would make sense for you to create your own github repo to coordinate the work on the actual debian package/packages and track any issues you found while working or planning it.

Then, if there are specific issues or changes that you need to evaluate with us, you can mention us (or mention this web-ext issue) in the issue created in your own github repository and we can evaluate how to proceed case by case.

e.g. the detailed proposal could be the first issue filed in your github repository (maybe paired with a markdown document committed in the same repository, even just the README.md file).

ranjithrajv commented 5 years ago

Agree with creating new repo, but rather than in github it is better to open in GitLab (self-hosted at salsa.debian.org), Mozilla Team has a team who work on debian packaging of Mozilla products[https://salsa.debian.org/mozilla-team]

Can you please help us with connecting to Mozilla debian packaging team and set up a repo there.