Firefox cannot open files in /usr/local/share/doc and /usr/share/javascript

[enz]

Both Firefox and Chromium in Ubuntu 21.10 cannot open files in /usr/local/doc and show a File-not-found error. IMO this is a bug because this directory often contains HTML files from locally installed software that now cannot be browsed with these HTML browsers anymore.

The cause is probably the apparmor configuration in /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/snap.firefox.firefox, which contains a read permission for /usr/doc, but not for /usr/local/doc.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

There is a snapd interface for this (system-packages-doc¹), but it only grants read access to /usr/share/doc, not /usr/local/doc.

I wonder if the snapd folks would be interested in extending the interface to grant read access to /usr/local/doc, too?

¹ https://snapcraft.io/docs/the-system-package-doc-interface

[Ian Johnson (anonymouse67)]

Read-only access to /usr/local/doc seems fine to me, should be pretty straight forward to extend the system-package-doc interface to also allow this directory too, only question would be if it should instead be a new interface like user-package-doc or something, but we can sort that out in a PR I think

[enz (markus-enzenberger)]

There is a typo in the title: the directory in question is /usr/local/share/doc, not /usr/local/doc.

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

I believe access to /usr/share/javascript should also be allowed, as several -doc packages shipping HTML documentation load javascript resources from there. See for example

$ apt rdepends libjs-mathjax | grep -- '-doc$' | wc -l
1246