IceCat-68.2.0-guix0-preview2 now available via GNU Guix

[Mark H Weaver]

Hello all,

Although the IceCat project has not yet released IceCat-68, for the
benefit of those who are impatient to update their IceCat (e.g. due to
security flaws recently publicized by Mozilla which affect IceCat-60), I
wanted to let you all know that the GNU Guix project now provides a
preliminary preview version of IceCat-68.

I must emphasize that this preliminary preview version likely does *not*
yet meet the privacy standards of the IceCat project.  It is a work in
progress, but for what it's worth I'm using it myself.

For now, to generate a source tarball for this preview version, you'll
need to install Guix, update it using "guix pull", and then run:

  guix build --source icecat

The resulting source tarball should, in theory, work on any system that
IceCat supports, not just Guix (although Android support is completely
untested so far, and might very well be broken at present).

More precisely, the command above tries to emulate what the IceCat
maintainers would normally do themselves to produce an official source
tarball, except that Guix does it *deterministically*, such that
precisely the same bit pattern should be produced every time.  Toward
that end, the timestamps and file ordering in the tarball are different
from what would be found in an official IceCat source tarball, the l10n
files are downloaded from fixed upstream revisions instead of grabbing
the latest at the time 'makeicecat' is run, and the included manifests
may be sorted differently.  Those are the only differences I found the
last time I checked.

If there are any courageous souls who would like to try generating the
source tarball using Guix and building it on their preferred OS, I would
be grateful to hear about your experiences, positive or negative.

Alternatively, it's also possible to use a pre-built
IceCat-68.2.0-guix0-preview2 binary package, by installing Guix as a
package manager on top of any x86_64 GNU/Linux system.

      Mark