Hi, On 22/09/2023 14:50, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
The current version of the Selenium bindings for all supported programming languages relies on a Rust executable called Selenium Manager for managing the webdriver executables required for the various browsers that the bindings interact with.
Selenium upstream has one git repository - https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium
which contains bindings for python (packaged in Debian as python3-selenium), ruby (packaged in Debian as ruby-selenium-webdriver), and C#/Java/Javascript (not AFAICT packaged in Debian) as well as the Selenium Manager, which is a rust CLI tool.
I agree that having the Manager available in Debian would enhance the experience of python and ruby Selenium users.
From the upstream changelog, it seems that version 4.11 is where searching for drivers is done via the Manager:
* Use Selenium Manager to locate drivers on PATH [ https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pull/12356 ]...and the Ruby bindings have a similar entry. But the latest version of ruby-selenium-webdriver in Debian is 4.4, so that issue hasn't bitten yet.
I'm afraid your analysis of how selenium manager might be made available in Debian is incorrect, however. It would need to be built like any other Rust program - with a source package and so on (Debian packages cannot download things from the internet during their build process); and the various rust dependencies would also need packaging if they're not already available in Debian.
This is quite a lot of work, and I can quite see that the (presumably) python specialists who have packaged python3-selenium would not feel able to take on that Rust work.
An alternative approach might be to patch python3-selenium to search PATH for drivers (as I think it did before that functionality was moved to the manager) - I'd be interested to hear if the maintainer would consider a patch do so if someone wrote one?
I see that python3-selenium now has a NEWS.Debian entry that points to README.Debian, which seems like a reasonable way to bring this to users' attention.
Regards, Matthew