Re: Please remove Ghostery from Mozzarella

[Luis Guzman]

Hello chippy,

I've been looking closely the development, and here some details I could 
share.

En 25/05/24 10:27, chippy escribió:
> Hi.
[...]
> I tried for few minutes the extension Ghostery and it connected back to
> several services (like collector-hpn.ghostery.net) . [...]
> > 
> Isn't this a scammy extension?
>
> What is this doing on Mozzarella? I expected Mozzarella to be a curated
> collection of extensions. However, this, unfortunately, does not seem
> the case.

By the length of the repository, that will require a full team of 
several people to be able to curate and review all the source code of 
each extension. I'm not aware of a distro with such workforce which is 
the closest to people curating large amount of packages / source code I 
could think of.

So Mozzarella uses scripts to parse extensions via API calls by the 
license they report to use, following that path I'm sure there could be 
cases where that could be wrong, as the license could be wrongly 
reported or not complied to.

Nevertheless, this approach allows to automate parsing the complete 
archive with no more work than the one done by the scrapper scripts.

> Another question:
>
> I was wondering if it could be possible on the mozzarella website to
> add, in the details of the extensions,
> - whether or not the extension phones homes,
> - whether or not the extension needs downloading except
> from https://addons.mozilla.org and
> - if it contacts third parties.

If you check the API search parameters, you'll see there is no way to 
know that, by an API call.
* https://mozilla.github.io/addons-server/topics/api/addons.html

Adding such integration would require to change the nature of Mozzarella 
code base to some sort of wiki database, which reminds me to the h-node 
effort.
> This would enormously help me and others, I imagine, in deciding
> whether or not to use an extension, like in this case.

The author has noted that Mozzarella on it's current state is developed 
on his free time[1]. So, volunteering to implement such changes would be 
a good starting point.

> Thanks in advance,
> Chippy.

Regards

[1] 
https://gitlab.trisquel.org/joeall/mozzarella/-/tree/develop-no-data?ref_type=heads#project-status