[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] Important changes to mozilla-devscripts

[Benjamin Drung]

Hi,

I have prepared some changes for mozilla-devscripts that require changes
for xul extensions and maybe xul applications. I want to know what you
think about these changes. Do you like them, are you against them, or do
you have different suggestions?

1) Move ${xpi:Recommends} to ${xpi:Depends}.

Currently the xul extension recommends the supported xul applications.
For example xul-ext-adblock-plus recommends "iceweasel | icedove |
iceape | conkeror". All supported packages could be removed and the xul
extension would be useless (unless you have install a xul application
manually). By moving ${xpi:Recommends} to ${xpi:Depends} the dependency
would be more strict and you need to have at least one supported xul
application installed.

This change requires all xul extension to add ${xpi:Depends} to Depends.
I made this change upwards and backwards compatible. dh_xul-ext will
print a warning and fall back to the previous behavior if ${xpi:Depends}
is not specified in debian/control. Adding ${xpi:Depends} and using an
older version of mozilla-devscript will have no negative effect.

2) Add min version to dependencies.

Having versioned dependencies makes sense, but having versioned
recommends makes no sense. Therefore we have to apply point 1 (moving
recommends to depends). Let's take adblock-plus on Ubuntu as example:
Instead of depending on "firefox | abrowser | thunderbird | seamonkey |
conkeror | prism", we would depend on "firefox | abrowser | thunderbird
(>= 3.0) | seamonkey (>= 2.0) | conkeror | prism (>= 1.0~b1)". In this
example xul-ext-adblock-plus supports all versions of the firefox,
abrowser, and conkeror package, but it requires at least version 3.0 of
thunderbird.

Adding a min version requires that the xul applications follow a version
policy. [1] All xul applications should take the upstream version string
and use "moz-version -d <upstream-version>" [2] to generate the Debian
upstream version. Let's take Firefox 4.0b7pre as example. "moz-version
-d 4.0b7pre" returns 4.0~b7~pre. Therefore iceweasel should use
"4.0~b7~pre-1" as Debian version (or something that is higher).

[1] That's why I CCed this mail to the Mozilla Maintainers. Please
respond to the mozext mailing list.
[2] This script is in mozilla-devscripts since version 0.14.

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Maintainer (www.debian.org)
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