alt Hacker News> I don't really find it reasonable to place demands on build tooling for an external company.
I'm not sure I agree, plenty of OS distributions do this. If you want to distribute on Arch in the official AUR you're going to need a PKGBUILD file. The difference though is they make it very easy to integrate custom distribution channels where you can build the package however you want, and I would really love to see browsers move more in that direction. Requiring centrally managed signatures from a corporation to install extensions in a purportedly open and community-driven product is just absurd to me.
> I'm not sure I agree, plenty of OS distributions do this. If you want to distribute on Arch in the official AUR you're going to need a PKGBUILD file.
This is fine. This is actually also roughly in line with what you need for an extension (a manifest.json file).
What the poster here is proposing is rather this: You cannot build that PKGBUILD file using any tooling other than the standard. Ex - you want to script how that PKGBUILD file get made? Fuck off, not allowed.
That's a COMPLETELY different take. It's not dictating limitations on the output (which I find reasonable as a required integration between products) it's dictating limitations on how a company produces that output (I find this monopoly behavior, why should they get to tell me what tools or processes to use? My output is the SAME.).