On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 15:10 +0000, Benjamin Otte wrote: > Brian Pepple <bpepple <at> fedoraproject.org> writes: > > > I would like to propose that we [possibly] install ... swfdec-mozilla > > by default starting with F9. > > > As the maintainer of Swfdec, I'd like to add some comments about this option > that should help you decide about this proposal. > > The short version is that I would not recommend Swfdec for distro releases that > do a long-term support release. Apart from that, I'd be very happy if > distributions include Swfdec as long as they don't expect a perfect Flash > player. > > Swfdec has arrived at a stage where it can be useful to a lot of people. It > plays most smaller Flash files and is often good enough for mid-sized Flash > files, such as the players on the various video sites or Flash games. However > it's also pretty bad on Flash-heavy websites and not very good at playing > Flash 9. > > However, there's also some reasons that speak against Swfdec. Swfdec has not > had a lot of exposure yet. I have no clue about how many people use it, but > shipping it by default on a distro such as Fedora would increase that a lot. > And exposure can uncover lots of issues that upstream (we) didn't think about, > such as finding lots of problematic crasher bugs or flooding our bugzilla. I've > experienced this exposure issue once with GStreamer, so I feel pretty well > prepared, but who knows. > > Another issue coupled with the above is that the Swfdec plugin runs in-process > in the browser. [1] This of course means that when Swfdec crashes, your browser > is gone, too. However, we're still proud of the Swfdec's stability. But you > have been warned. :) > Another thing is that Swfdec has never been security audited. We've run it with > tools like zzuf, we've got pretty evil tests in our testsuite, we copy an > existing and proven system, but we're no security experts and Swfdec is 50k > lines of code. > > Swfdec is also in heavy development, I tend to call it "surprisingly usable > alpha software". We change a lot of code quickly. (A year ago Swfdec didn't > even play Youtube.) This also means that we currently don't want to support the > current versions eternally. (Probably - like Gnome - we'll actively support it > until the next stable version is released in 6 months.) This is my main reason > for not suggesting it for long-term support releases. > > So that being said, I'd be very happy to see you install Swfdec-Mozilla by > default. I'm running it in my default browser since about a year and I didn't > get annoyed at it. > Thanks a lot for this perspective, Benjamin. One thing we can do to get you some exposure is to put swfdec-mozilla in the default install for the beta. If the deluge of crasher bug reports turns out to be overwhelming, we'll remove it again for the final release. -- Fedora-desktop-list mailing list Fedora-desktop-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-desktop-list
