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

[Mike Hommey]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 01:26:03AM +0100, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> 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).