Vivaldi browser for Debian/Ubuntu

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> Ah yes, not to mention also, it's not in Debian main, nor contrib, nor
> even non-free ... at least as far as I can tell from my quick
> searches.
> 
> So, also, all the potential hazards of using software from outside of
> ones OS distribution may fully apply.
> 
> Doesn't mean there aren't cases where one may want to venture outside
> of such ... but chose wisely and carefully.

There certainly have been proprietary Web browsers available via
Debian's non-free collection.  I'm pretty sure I correctly remember that
Netscape Communicator and Netscape Navigator had Debian packages. The
prerequisites are (1) copyright-owner permissions sufficient to permit
hosting and redistribution, (2) a way to ensure that the resulting
package complies with Debian Policy, and (3) a Debian developer willing
to go to significant trouble for a codebase that's not even open source.

I've frequently been impressed at the inventiveness of Debian developers
in working around upstream restrictions, e.g., any number of *-installer 
open source packages that pull down an upstream proprietary binary-only
codebase from the one special-snowflake place on the Internet permitted
to host it, perform local edits to make it Policy-compliant, and install
it.  The old qmail-src package was also amazing that way:  It started
with the proprietary qmail-1.03 source tarball that was (then) the most
practical thing to distribute, applied local patches to make qmail
FHS-compliant, compiled it, made a .deb, and installed that.

-- 
Cheers,                       "We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
Rick Moen                     We believe in: rough consensus and running code."
rick at linuxmafia.com                    -- Dave Clark, IETF (unofficial motto)
McQ! (4x80)