[PureOS] Clarification of PureOS browser and browser policy

[Jeremiah C. Foster]

On Fri, 2019-02-15 at 22:36 +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Hi Jeremiah,
> 
> Quoting Jeremiah C. Foster (2019-02-15 18:23:16)
> 
> > Having a policy for an issue like this would allow someone to
> > quickly 
> > go to our policy, quote it in the issue tracker and/or demonstrate 
> > that in fact we do have httpseverywhere installed, and then close
> > the 
> > bug which I feel is a positive outcome. As it stands now, we have
> > a 
> > lot of issues that seem to attract a lot of commentary but little 
> > change is effecutated.
> 
> I am not convinced that a policy helps triage issues, but perhaps I
> am 
> simply not imaginative enough and it could help if you elaborate on
> what 
> you think such policy might contain?

For me "policy" is just what we do, i.e. what is our PureBrowser
policy? Well, we patch it and remove some branding. Obviously that is a
truncated answer, but if we had a policy document that outlined what we
actually do, then we can refer to that when there are issues or
questions. 

Such a policy might contain;

"- We remove all hidden system add-ons, including "Activity Stream"
which cause our version of Firefox to render a blank start page
currently.

- We not only change default search engine, but also disable
geospecific search engine resolution, disable telemetry, disable crash
reporting, and disable and lock Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).

- We do not install any add-ons into Firefox.  But we force our users
to  additionally install a few independent add-ons when they use the
default settings of our package manager to install Firefox.

Our changes (in addition to Debian which apply 30 concrete patches to 
upstream sourcecode and involve customizing build routines involving 
roughly 70 files) are documented at 
https://source.puri.sm/pureos/packages/firefox-esr and specific
changes for each of our package releases are summarized in our
changelog, e.g. 
https://source.puri.sm/pureos/packages/firefox-esr/blob/pureos/60.5.0esr-1pureos1/debian/changelog"

This above quote comes from another email but is an excellent policy
document in my mind. So good that I thought I would document it for
posterity in our mailing list. 

In fact, the third point above might explain 
https://tracker.pureos.net/T712?

Cheers,

Jeremiah
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 659 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puri.sm/pipermail/pureos-project/attachments/20190308/35610b35/attachment-0001.sig>