[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] Bug#926586: ublock-origin: separate packages for Firefox and Chromium may be necessary

[Markus Koschany]

Source: ublock-origin
Version: 1.18.4+dfsg-2
Severity: wishlist

adding Sean to CC, perhaps he has some ideas too as the previous
maintainer.

Hi,

I was asked by upstream if we could package uBo for Firefox and
Chromium in separate packages again. The reasoning is that we had
recently two severe bugs in ublock-origin that broke the addon for
Firefox users (#925337 and #920652).

There are sometimes subtle and bigger differences between these two web
browsers. A seemingly simple configuration option in the manifest file
(#925337) disabled the addon completely or some code had to be
rewritten so it could be used for both browsers (vapi-webrequest.js in
#920652).

Upstream maintains the webext version of uBo because we asked him to
do that. I assume it was to simplify the Debian packaging, creating
one package that works for both browsers. This is obviously extra work
for upstream. Now we have a situation where we can't work around the
problem. The Firefox web browser does not support the ingocnito:split
option while Chromium does. Upstream told me that the alternative
option which is supported by both browsers, incognito:spanning,
breaks Chromium for certain use cases.

What are we going to do?

1. Is there a way to load or disable certain manifest file options for
a specific browser? If yes, we could probably continue the current
approach.

2. Would it be better to create two packages again? How can we make
sure that users still can use both web browsers at the same time with
ublock-origin? We would have to install both packages into different
directories. How can we make sure they are properly detected?

3. We could keep the current installation paths but then we had to use
Conflicts because it would not be possible to install both packages at the
same time anymore.

Thoughts?

Markus