Use the ubuntu startpage by default

[Guillaume Pascal]

Binary package hint: chromium-browser

Use the ubuntu startpage start.ubuntu.com/10.04/ by default home in chromium browser

[Evan Martin (Chromium) (evan-chromium)]

I believe the Novell folks added some "default preferences" support just for this sort of thing. I'm not exactly sure how it works, though! :)

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

Reading the .spec from OpenSuse, this support seems quite simple. It used 3 parts :
- 1 master preferences file (master_preferences)
- Installing it in /etc/chromium (it should be /etc/chromium-browser in our case)
- Patching the source to be able to read this file on first startup (chromium-master-prefs-path.patch)

It could be also improved by providing an alternatives system (using update-alternatives), to be able to set different master preferences.

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Sounds like a good idea. I agree this would make the browser fit more neatly into Ubuntu.

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

Attached is the debdiff with the current version (5.0.375.70~r48679-0ubuntu2), I can't find the bzr tree for the debian packaging.

I'll upload it in a couple of days if it's not include before in a real upload. I need this to customize the chromium installation on Lubuntu, and I think the Netbook edition need it also.

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

I forgot to mention that the preference file need some tweaking for the default values, but it's up to you to put what you want :-)

[Fabien Tassin (fta)]

Please, *don't* upload this to ubuntu (see the Maintainer field).
I want to provide an alternative to have the default page for those who don't want the ubuntu startup page.
In firefox, it's provided via ubufox, which could be removed. I would have preferred a similar mechanism in chromium.

[Evan Martin (Chromium) (evan-chromium)]

BTW, I've seen some patches go by upstream that modify the location we look for files like the master prefs. Independently of how you package it, it'd be nice if you pushed patches upstream (or at least started bugs uptream) to fix paths like these when you think our default behavior is wrong. (I agree this file belongs in /etc; I was informed recently that even google-chrome, which follows FHS and lives in /opt, ought to be putting its conffiles in /etc/opt/ according to FHS.)

[Evan Martin (Chromium) (evan-chromium)]

http://codereview.chromium.org/2854005 (note the top-level description of paths is wrong; read the diff to see what actually chagned)

[Evan Martin (Chromium) (evan-chromium)]

http://codereview.chromium.org/2854005/diff/31001/32002

[Fabien Tassin (fta)]

this means chromium will now use /etc/chromium/policies if present.
I already have /etc/chromium-browser with a 'default' file where i let users specify which flags they always want to pass to chromium.
I guess i'll use that path instead as it matches both the package name and the binary name, meaning i have to patch the sources. (just to 's,/etc/chromium/policies,/etc/chromium-browser/policies,')
@evan: any chance you'll adopt it? after all, you already use the name chromium-browser in various places.

also i want chromium to stay as it is by default, and provide a dist package that will ship those distro specific prefs.
This dist package could be seeded in the same way 'ubufox' is for firefox.
I'm still unsure about how stable those prefs are. If they are stable, that package could have its own source package (like ububox) so the same could be used for the various builds (stable, beta, dev and trunk) and its content could be tweaked by (for example) the desktop team without rebuilding everything.
What do you think ?

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

i think we should get an official mechanism for this upstream. that mechanism, as fta pointed out should allow us to put changes to preference in packages != chromium. so basically having a pref folder that is read in run-parts order would make sense. in that way you could ship a 90_final-pref file that overrides not so strong defaults shipped in a file like 30-medium-strong-pref

[Fabien Tassin (fta)]

if i read the code correctly, upstream wants (*) to allow /etc/chromium/policies/managed/
and /etc/chromium/policies/recommended/

then, a given pref is taken from the 1st of:
- managed/
- user defined
- recommended/

so we want mostly to provide prefs in recommended/ so users can overwrite our choices.

(*) it seems to be a work in progress, as 'master_preferences' in DIR_EXE is still what is actually used

[Evan Martin (Chromium) (evan-chromium)]

I think a patch for us to use /etc/chromium-browser is reasonable.

I think fta's analysis in #13 is right -- I believe the point of "managed" is for prefs that cannot be overridden (some corps want to e.g. force SSL settings or whatever). I don't know a whole lot about how this stuff is all going to work though. Maybe ask on chromium-dev about the difference between the recommended policies and master preferences, it seems pretty confusing to me.

[shawnlandden (shawnlandden)]

it should be /etc/chromium, as that is not in use, and is what the debian package is named

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

It appears the startpage in recent versions of chromium is hardcoded to a custom view that displays most visited pages as well as a google search box if google is the current search engine.
I couldn't find any preference for users to set a custom start page.