On Mon, Jun 11, 2018 at 10:43 AM Tom Callaway <[email protected]> wrote:

> Background:
>
> I made the original v8 Fedora package many moons ago, when I was more
> optimistic about the possibility of separating the useful components
> inside of chromium. Since that point, it has become clear that while v8
> is useful software, the following facts are also true:
>
> 1. The v8 upstream is entirely disinterested in the concept of
> maintaining any sort of ABI/API consistency between releases.
> 2. The v8 that is used in chromium is not necessarily compatible with
> the upstream v8, as they have a history of picking and choosing code
> changes (and even applying chromium specific changes locally).
> 3. Virtually all consumers of v8 (including chromium) take a git
> checkout (not a specific one, just whatever they decided to code to) and
> use that revision, often creating a local fork of v8 from that revision,
> as they are either unwilling or unable to track v8 upstream.
> 4. Since v8 has no concept of a "stable" release that I can see, they
> simply do security fixes to the master branch, which, combined with the
> code changing violently, makes it very difficult to backport security
> fixes.
>


For all of these same reasons, the Node.js SIG opted to carry a bundled
copy of v8 in that package as well. I think we should move to have v8
considered to be a copylib for all reasonable purposes within Fedora.
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