Bug#689858: gnome depends on adblock-plus

[Jonathan Dowland]

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 03:03:19AM +0200, berenger.morel at neutralite.org wrote:
> gnome depends on xul-ext-adblock-plus.
…
> So, I would like to know if someone knows why this dependency
> exists, instead of a recommendation or suggestion.

I was curious so I investigated. The dependency was added in this
commit¹ with the message "Require firefox extensions that match epiphany
functionality: keyring, adblock."  Looking at the commit log, an earlier
commit sheds some more light²: "Install iceweasel instead of epiphany :(
See bug#682481."

So, GNOME proper includes the Epiphany browser, but Debian's GNOME
metapackage omits it due to the lack of security support. Iceweasel is
used in its place, and the XUL* extensions are also depended upon so
that users have the same level of functionality as Epiphany has.

That's the logic, but the consequence is lots of problems as #689858
indicates. It seems to me that attempting to get feature parity with
Epiphany is a nice goal, but perhaps not mission critical: would the
GNOME maintainers not consider moving the xul-* dependencies to
Recommends?

The last consensual message to #682481 seemed to suggest that depending
on chromium made more sense than Iceweasel, so I don't know why that
wasn't done, but perhaps it could. I haven't seen any comment from the
GNOME maintainers regarding this suggestion.


¹ http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/pkg-gnome/desktop/unstable/meta-gnome3/debian/control?revision=35790&view=markup
² http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/pkg-gnome/desktop/unstable/meta-gnome3/debian/control?revision=35758&view=markup