Created attachment 393266 [details] New ebuild. On some systems, it makes no sense whatsoever to build a browser plugin. Chrome in particular totally ignores system NPAPI plugins these days. The attached ebuild adds the 'nsplugin' USE flag to allow control of whether or not to build the plugin. It is default enabled to preserve current behavior.
I am not sure we should have a USE flag to end up installing one less file :/ (as it doesn't change anything, for example, when thinking in adding more dependencies or similar). If people don't want to install the plugins, maybe they should rely on INSTALL_MASK for that. But I don't have a strong opinion on this, lets see what other team members think
(In reply to Pacho Ramos from comment #1) > I am not sure we should have a USE flag to end up installing one less file > :/ (as it doesn't change anything, for example, when thinking in adding more > dependencies or similar). If people don't want to install the plugins, maybe > they should rely on INSTALL_MASK for that. > > But I don't have a strong opinion on this, lets see what other team members > think My thought is less about the installed file than the fact that disabling it reduces the build time. It's not a huge reduction in build time, but is still enough to be significant for less powerful systems like the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBoard. Further, having a use flag to control this is more consistent with other packages in portage.
I confirm that this but is presnt also in amd64 stable. It can be disabled in firefox (that can also open pdf files independently, while the evince plugin overwrites this behaviour), however it is annoying and a use flag to disable the plugin would be welcomed
IMHO browser plugins should always be controlled by a USE flag (unless the whole package is primarily intended as a browser plugin). Unnecessary plugins are a potential security hole and a potential source of crashes for the browser, which for most people is the single most important desktop application.
Then you can add totem and gnome-shell to your list.
(In reply to Gilles Dartiguelongue from comment #5) > Then you can add totem and gnome-shell to your list. Well, totem has finally stopped installing browser plugins in 3.14, and gnome-shell is a special case (the plugin can be activated only for one hard-coded domain). +*evince-3.14.2-r1 (22 Mar 2015) + + 22 Mar 2015; Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org> + +evince-3.14.2-r1.ebuild: + Make browser plugin optional (bug #535704, thanks to Austin S. Hemmelgarn).
