[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] Plan for scrapbook?

[W. Martin Borgert]

Hi,

if I understand correctly, in some months firefox ESR 52 will be
replaced by firefox ESR 60 in Debian 9, when the former reaches
EOL. This time, things get a little bit special, because XUL based
extensions will not work any longer and must be replaced by
WebExtension ones.

There will be at least one problematic case, which is scrapbook. So
far, there is no replacement (at least not in Debian) and users of
scrapbook will practically lose access to all the data they saved in
the past. (Up to eleven years, scrapbook appeared 2007 in Debian.) The
data will, of course, stay on disk, but the normal way of accessing it
through the menu in Firefox, of adding and removing pages, of editing
them in Firefox, will be gone, if scrapbook is not updated.

Scrapbook is a very useful tool esp. for many non-geek users of
Firefox, including everybody working in journalism, all kind of
research, everybody who needs access to web pages, when one is
offline, etc. Therefore, I fear, that many of those users will not
anticipate, that the scrapbook function will be gone after an update
to Firefox 60, and many people will even panic, because they will
believe that their actual data is lost (which is not the case).

I wonder, how we can help those users and prevent a mass panic. Does
somebody know:

  1. Is there a suitable new scrapbook version or variant, that we can
     get into Debian in time? (Either by means of stable-updates or by
     means of backports or sloppy backports.)

  2. Would this new scrapbook use or import existing data? If not, how
     can we help our users to access their saved data? Is there any
     other program we would have to package for Debian?

Thanks in advance for any helpful ideas!

Cheers, Martin