Pack VS gentoo

The `pack`[0] compression utility that reached the HN front page the other day[1] is setting off my alarm bells right now. (It was at the time too, but now doubly so)

It's written in Pascal, and the only (semi-)documented way to build it yourself is to use a graphical IDE, and pull in pre-compiled library binaries (stored in the git repo of a dependency which afaict Pack is the only dependent of - appears to be maintained by the same pseudonymous author but from a different account).

I've opened an issue[2] outlining my concerns. I'm certainly not accusing them of having backdoored binaries, but if I was setting up a project to be deliberately backdoorable, it'd look a lot like this.

[0] https://pack.ac/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39793805

[2] https://github.com/PackOrganization/Pack/issues/10

Whilst Firefox may support hardware video decoding, Mesa since March 2022 disables patent encumbered codecs by default[1], and distributions such as Fedora and OpenSuse do not explicitly enable these patent encumbered codecs to avoid possible legal problems. Even Gentoo (built from source code by the user) requires the user to explicitly enable a USE flag (proprietary-codes) to use patent encumbered codecs.[2]

The thought process is that AMD, NVIDIA, Intel and the likes are not providing a patent license with their hardware.[3] They are instead just supplying part of an overall system that together with operating system kernel, display manager software, video player software, etc allows the decoding and encoding of patent encumbered video files. Open source software projects and distributions are concerned they'd be found to be infringing patents by enabling a complete solution out-of-the-box. Hence they put some hurdles in place so that a user has to go out of their way to separately piece together the various parts to form a complete system capable of encoding and decoding patent encumbered codecs.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15...

[2] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/1265a159743d7f07185a...

[3] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]...

Thank you! I don't live in git and this helps! Normally under gentoo I shouldn't have to. This actual git https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo (as opposed to the gentoo browser view) plus this "checkout the commit" should get me much further. ... And probably deserve some space in the gentoo docs.

You choose - here's a list

(pending) gentoo/gentoo #30595 sys-cluster/kubescape: new package, add 2.2.6

profiles/targets/desktop/make.defaults: