Brave for linux installs cron job and /etc conf behind one's back

[squalou]

Hi,

I’ve just noticed that the .deb package of brave does contain an “/etc/cron.daily” job.

Fortunately my distro of choice removes it as it repackages things. (Arch).

Fiddling with system cron jobs is not the nice and right way to behave.

If it comes to software updates : distro package managers must be trusted. Having a package itself tweak the repo sources (as the job seems to be doing) is not something I’d want to see on my system.

Apparently there are also system-wide parameters in /etc/default/brave-browser … seriously a browser needs to stay in userland, and should not rely on system-wide configuration.

thanks for reading,

regards

[justsomeone1]

that interesting to check the response
thanks for sharing that and have a nice day

[squalou]

Still no reaction, leaving a comment so it won’t close

[justsomeone1]

let me ask someone from the team to help us here @sriram

and have a nice day both of you

[fmarier]

If you look at the first non-commented-out line of the cron job, you’ll see this:

# Don't add the Chrome repo (brave/brave-browser#1084)
exit 0

In other words, it never actually does anything.

It’s a little confusing that we ship all of this dead code, I agree, but it’s an artifact of the way we take the Chromium upstream code and patch it up to make Brave.

[squalou]

Thanks !

as said : on Arch the script is removed and I was lazy and did not extract it from the .deb to check further. My bad.

Any idea what /etc/default/brave-browser does ?

[fmarier]

That file sets some variables which are used by the cronjob:

$ cat /etc/default/brave-browser
repo_add_once="true"
repo_reenable_on_distupgrade="true"

$ grep repo_ /etc/cron.daily/brave-browser
# setting "repo_add_once" and/or "repo_reenable_on_distupgrade" to "true" or
if [ "$repo_add_once" = "true" ]; then
    sed -i -e 's/[[:space:]]*repo_add_once=.*/repo_add_once="false"/' "$DEFAULTS_FILE"
if [ "$repo_reenable_on_distupgrade" = "true" ]; then

so it’s also unused in Brave given that the cronjob doesn’t execute anything.