[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] debian package naming conventions for extensions for mozilla-based tools

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 06/26/2009 05:05 AM, Guido Günther wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:39:57AM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>> On 06/23/2009 06:00 PM, Guido Günther wrote:
>>> Having other distros
>>> ignore the branding issues with Firefox doesn't help.
>> to be fair, i don't think the other distributions *have* the same
>> branding issues as debian.  I fully support the DFSG and the DSC.  That
> They do AFAIK. The problem is that Mozilla doesn't allow
> redistribution as Firefox if you patch the source. This is silently
> ignored by most other distros.

It's actually not silently ignored.  For example, the Gentoo team spoke
with MozCorp and got permission:

 http://bugs.gentoo.org/76920

as did the FreeBSD team (i can't find the link right now).  I believe
Ubuntu did a similar dance with Mozilla as well.  And it seems likely
that MozCorp would be happy to make such a deal with Debian, if we were
up for it.

But Debian is constitutionally unable to make such an agreement and
continue distributing firefox in main, because it would violate the
"discrimination against groups" clause of the DFSG.  This is why i don't
think the other distros have the same branding issues as Debian.

(this is not a criticism of Debian; i actually think we're doing the
right thing here, and wish more distros had our commitment to strong
core principles)

> We're also prefixing all python modules with python- and all perl
> modules end with -perl. This makes identifying things a lot easier.

It does indeed, i'm not opposed to visible naming schemes in general.
But if we started shipping python as viper when many of our derivative
distros continued shipping it as python, i'd be reluctant to rename all
our python modules to viper-* -- i don't know what would be the right
thing to do in that situation, though, which is why i'm bringing this up.

> It'd say:
> 
> <prod>-<ext> if it only covers one XUL based product
> mozilla-<ext> if it covers several.
> 
> I don't see much point in differentiating this further now. If this
> sound reasonable I'll add this to:
> 	http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianMozExtTeam

So if an extension works with both firefox and iceweasel (that's two
different xul-based packages(?)), it would be named mozilla-<ext> ?  If
not (if we name it iceweasel-<ext> for debian, do we have suggestions
for how downstream (firefox-using) distros should work with it?

For example, if downstream just renamed the package firefox-<ext> and
rebuilt it, we could get into a situation with conflicting packages: 2
versions of the same extension attempted to install because they have
different names, but which both install files into
/usr/share/mozilla-extensions/<ext>.  so do we suggest a pseudo-package
instead named "firefox-<ext>" which Depends: on the iceweasel package?

As i think through this, there's another option:  Name all the packages
mozilla-<ext>, and have them place their extensions in
/usr/share/mozilla-extensons/<ext>  (or /usr/lib/mozilla-extensions, if
there are arch-dependent components) and provide an iceweasel-<ext>
metapackage that Depends: on mozilla-<ext> and links
/usr/share/mozilla-extensions/<ext> into /usr/lib/iceweasel/extensions.
 Then downstream can have their own firefox-<ext> package, following the
same convention.

Any other thoughts or suggestions?  Much of this thinking was based on
looking at the current packaging for things like engimail and firebug.

	--dkg

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 890 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-mozext-maintainers/attachments/20090626/94dd5e6c/attachment.pgp>