Librewolf is in a bad shape. Not just in nixpkgs, but upstream as well.
In nixpkgs, browsers have been a constant painful argument.
I have written up #405187 to clarify some security requirements for packages.
While Librewolf doesn't immediately violate the requirements outlined there,
we should strive for better than just the absolute minimum.
Personally, I no longer feel confident in my ability to adequately contribute,
test, and backport Librewolf updates. The past few months have been stressful IRL,
and maintaining a browser in nixpkgs is no longer sustainable for me.
In the time I intended to take a break, #471511 was opened to update to 146.0.1.
This was not merged in a timely manner, despite me not being the only committer among LW maintainers.
librewolf-bin isn't looking much better. #464467 is open since Nov 24th,
entirely unacceptable for a browser. The single remaining maintainer, @DominicWrege,
already proposed dropping the package entirely, LeSuisse marked it vulnerable in the meantime.
The situation upstream does not look much better. Checking the [commit history](https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source/commits/branch/main),
they are barely keeping up with upstream firefox. The maintainers have
repeatedly communicated (on matrix) they were close to burning out.
The code changes being done are mostly bumps with patch rebases,
removals of patches which no longer apply, and a lot of somewhat trivial changes.
Very few substantial changes to librewolf itself are made.
I originally switched to Librewolf when firefox expanded their enshitification efforts,
at a time where search engine policies were not possible to define with mainline firefox.
Mainline started supporting search engine policies since. While enshitification
did not slow down, librewolf does not keep up sufficiently to combat that effectively.
I appreciate the project for what it does and tries to do.
But i no longer believe the project is sustainable.
Not in nixpkgs, and probably not upstream either.
Well, what now? I am not the last maintainer of librewolf source package.
I am hoping someone else will step up, and maybe start actually committing open PRs too.
Personally, i will be moving back to mainline firefox, and apply [Phoenix](https://github.com/celenityy/Phoenix).
Phoenix has a nice flake, and does not require a browser recompile for the changes it does.
Phoenix does many of the things librewolf does, while imposing less of a maintainance burden.
I wish the best of luck to all remaining librewolf maintainers.
Nix 2.28 seems to have been unbuildable for a long time due to
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/11295.
This particularly surfaces in advanced CI setups where the store
locations are non standard and build user separation disappears as the
build system seems to be hiding bugs using these features.
Reproducing the issue that this commit fixes can be achieved by running:
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A nixVersions.nix_2_28 --store /tmp/alt --check
This only fixes Linux builds as they are the only "truly" affected by
this.
This commit can be reverted once upstream fixes this issue.
Change-Id: I55d7adee2dee7c735490f33395ba061c27cf4319
Signed-off-by: Raito Bezarius <raito@lix.systems>
Ethan Carter Edwards