[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] Fwd: xul-ext-adblock-plus

[Ximin Luo]

Hey,

Firstly, disclaimer: I'm not the package maintainer. Although I'm on the team and it would be OK for me to upload, I've never worked with this package before so I'd prefer to defer the decision to the maintainers:

Dmitry E. Oboukhov - not sure how active he is, only a few uploads recently
Andrea Veri - he has retired as a DD, unlikely that we'll hear from him
David Prévot - seems to be active, since he forwarded this email

I do have a few comments, to try to drive the discussion forward:

Sebastian Noack:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> we are quite happy to see Adblock Plus being included in Debian, and like
> to thank you (and in particular David Prévot) for your work to make that
> possible. However, we'd like to discuss the patches you redistribute our
> code with.
> 
> First of all, you bypass our dependency system [1], getting the latest
> version of the dependencies by other means [2], in order to avoid network
> activity during build, I suppose. While I understand this motivation, I'd
> like to point out that the latest version of a dependency is not always
> compatible. Even if the build isn't failing, you might introduce harder to
> find bugs, unless you make sure to use the correct revisions as indicated
> in the dependencies file [3]. But there might be a much simpler solution;
> we provide source archives with all dependencies in the right version
> included [4], specifically for package maintainers. ;)
> 

This is sensible, thanks for the pointer. I guess the original packager just made an oversight.

I'd just fix the terminology though, these aren't exactly "dependencies" but "internal components" that together form adblock plus. Debian has gotten criticism before (IMO unwarranted) for using slightly different versions of dependencies than upstream, but this situation is different. You're not releasing these components separately to be depended-upon by external projects. Dependencies are that, and they are *supposed* to work across multiple versions (or you bump the major version and Debian creates a new co-installable package), so complaints about Debian "using incorrect versions" are usually misdirected IMO.

TL;DR: the case you have described is different, I agree with you with this case, but let's not get it confused with the other cases.

> It seems people weren't too happy, our first run page being the first thing
> they see when they start Firefox for the first time, back then when
> xul-ext-adblock-plus was a dependency of the Gnome meta package [5]. As a
> result, you moved all tabs opened by Adblock Plus into the background. Note
> that this not only effects the first run page, but also documentation pages
> opened through the user interface. Furthermore, while we see why it might
> be problematic to push the first run page into the foreground, if Adblock
> Plus is installed by default, this seems to no longer to be the case. And
> we are concerned that nobody will notice the first run page due to this
> (apparent obsolete) change, not to mention documentation pages opened that
> way.
> 

Do you have a concrete proposal here? I agree that showing all pages in the background is worse than showing one page in the foreground on first-run.

However what happens in Debian in practice is that first-run is actually "on every upgrade" which can get pretty annoying. (I haven't checked if this is the case for Adblock Plus, but it has been the case for some other extensions I maintain; I assume this is an artifact of the mozilla extension system.) If every extension did this, I would be perpetually closing tabs. So I can understand why the maintainer wanted to disable that page, and I'd also support disabling that page.

> Finally, you seem to disagree with our initiative for Acceptabe Ads [6],
> and decided to disable this feature by default. We, however, believe that a
> middle ground discouraging intrusive ads by blocking them, while still
> allowing websites to monetize, is fundamental for a free and sustainable
> web, and eventually better for everybody. I cannot, and don't want to,
> judge whether this is in line with Debian's philosophy. But we feel quite
> uncomfortable having you redistribute a product under our brand, that does
> not have this feature enabled by default. I hope this topic is less
> controversial now, where Adblock Plus is no longer automatically installed
> for Gnome users. But otherwise, we might also agree to a compromise in
> which the user has to make an explicit decision (e.g. through apt/dpkg
> during installation or on the first run page), as long as no user action
> doesn't result into blocking all ads.
> 

I personally think this is OK, since ublock-origin exists in Debian as an alternative that defaults to blocking all ads and doesn't have a concept of "acceptable".

Ximin

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