bug#18581: IceCat fails to build on i686 and needs security updates

[Mark H Weaver]

Andreas Enge <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 01:37:08PM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
>> More importantly, the version of IceCat we are using is almost a year
>> old, with no security updates applied during that time.
>> 
>> We should update to IceCat 31, which is currently available only from
>> Trisquel, here:
>
> This is a problem with the gnuzilla maintenance, which is possibly solved:
>    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnuzilla/2014-09/msg00008.html
> Although the lack of news since September 11 is not encouraging.

Jason Self spoke to the new IceCat maintainer (Rubén Rodríguez, also the
Trisquel BDFL), and reports that the current plan is to base IceCat on
the Firefox v31 Extended Support Release (ESR), to get security updates
from Mozilla, and also to get the patches from TorBrowser.  Rubén says
that he's almost done modifying his scripts for the FF31 ESR, at which
point we should be in good shape.

I also asked on #parabola to find out how they deal with this issue.
Apparently their IceCat is also old and unpatched, but they have scripts
to modify Debian's Iceweasel to comply with the FSDG here:

  https://projects.parabola.nu/abslibre.git/tree/libre/iceweasel

We might consider adding this to Guix as well.

     Thanks,
       Mark