Hi!
Adobe has handed the responsability of maintaining its Flash Player for
Linux to Google who has ported it from NPAPI to PPAPI (also known as
Pepper Plugin API). This API is cross-platform but currently only
supported by Chrome/Chromium. Firefox has no plan to support
it.
While Google Chrome is shipped with Flash Player plugin, this is not the
case of Chromium (because Flash Player is still not free software). The
usual way to get Flash Player for Chromium is to use the "old" NPAPI
Flash Player. For Debian, this usually means installing
flashplugin-nonfree package.
On Linux, Flash Player plugin has major problems:
1. Not updated any more, besides security problem.
2. No accelerated rendering (disabled at some point in Flash Player 11).
3. Upstream may decide to withdraw (security) support at any point and
has already done so in the past. However, Adobe has commited itself
for a 5 year support of the current version.
It is possible to use, in Chromium, the PPAPI Flash Player from
Chrome. Here is an example of snippet that can be added to
/etc/chromium/default:
[ ! -d /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash ] || {
FLASH_VERSION="$(sed -n 's/ *"version": "\([0-9.]*\)",/\1/p' \
/opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/manifest.json)"
CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --ppapi-flash-path=/opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=$FLASH_VERSION"
}
It would be convenient for our users of Chromium to be able to have a
package similar to flashplugin-nonfree to get an up-to-date Pepper Flash
Player for Chromium.
Daniel is maintaining a PPA archive with such a solution for Ubuntu:
https://launchpad.net/~skunk/+archive/pepper-flash
I would like to have some insights on how we could provide such a
package for Debian users (which could be then reused in Ubuntu, so I put
Chris in Cc).
There are several solutions:
1. Do like flashplugin-nonfree: provide a package containing some
script that will fetch another GPG-signed script to check and
download the appropriate version of Google Chrome, extract the
Pepper Flash plugin and install it correctly. Optionally, provide a
cron to keep the plugin up-to-date (this is not the case of
flashplugin-nonfree). With such a script, the package does not need
to be updated when new versions of Flash plugin are available.
2. Do like Daniel's PPA or current Ubuntu package
(flashplugin-installer): whenever a new version is available, the
package is updated with the appropriate location for Google Chrome
and a checksum. On upgrade, the package will also update Flash
Player plugin. On Ubuntu, stable releases get updates through the
security channel. For Debian, we could either do this, use volatile
or get an exception similar to Firefox and Chromium.
3. Put Flash Player plugin into a traditional package.
There is an important drawback with the first two solutions: Google only
provides the latest version of Google Chrome. So, when an update is
available, users will get errors until the remote script is updated (for
solution 1) or the package is updated (for solution 2). There is no such
problem for solution 3. The problem with solution 3 is the EULA only
grants a license for use "as provided by Google":
https://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_text.html
Daniel already asked for some guidance on debian-legal@ with no luck:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2013/02/msg00010.html
In this post, he proposed an alternative to solution 3 which would ship
Google Chrome into a package and only uses the plugin part. However,
like for NPAPI Flash Player, the EULA seems to forbid redistribution.
Any thoughts?
--
printk("What? oldfid != cii->c_fid. Call 911.\n");
2.4.3 linux/fs/coda/cnode.c
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