Bug#608171: ITP: kmozillahelper -- Iceweasel-KDE integration

[P. J. McDermott]

On 12/28/2010 11:34 AM, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 09:50:21AM -0500, P. J. McDermott wrote:
>   
>> I'm admittedly not too familiar with the Mozilla codebase, so I don't
>> know if packaging this as an extension is possible. If so, then I would
>> agree that that would be better than patching mainline Iceweasel. I was
>> in fact planning to defer to your knowledge and judgment on this once I
>> got the package up on mentors.debian.net. Below is the Mozilla Firefox
>> patch in question, as applied by two distributions; if you have a
>> chance, can you let me know what the best way to include this would be
>> (extension or Iceweasel patch)?
>>
>> openSUSE (upstream) patch, applied to Firefox 3.6.6:
>> http://gitorious.org/firefox-kde-opensuse/firefox-kde-opensuse/blobs/master/mozilla.patch
>>
>> Ubuntu patch, applied to Firefox 3.6.13:
>> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mozillateam/firefox/firefox-3.6.head/annotate/head%3A/debian/patches/firefox-kde.patch
>>     
> IIRC the patch lies in some bug against iceweasel/xulrunner at the
> moment. I still think it's too intrusive and not implemented the right
> way.
>
>   
>> Also, it seems this helper application currently does not work with
>> other Mozilla applications. Because of this, the Ubuntu maintainer
>> renamed the binary package to firefox-kde-support in Ubuntu 10.10.
>>     
> That doesn't make much sense. At the very least mime type handling
> should work.
>   

True. The most trivial Firefox-specific code I found in the package was
the use of the "firefox" application icon in the about data (and I can't
see how that would be visible to the user anyway) and the application
name in the download complete notification. Other than that, I just see
isDefaultBrowser() and setDefaultBrowser() shell service methods that,
worst case, might have to be replaced in other Mozilla applications. If
you know the equivalents for the other applications, then I can
re-implement those methods when/if the time comes.

>> Any help you can provide with this would be appreciated. If you'd like
>> to see what I have so far (the package is built and lintian-clean, I
>> mainly just have to test it more), I can push the package to
>> mentors.d.n. Otherwise, I'll hold off for now.
>>     
> I'll check what hooks could be used to make that a full extension. The
> xul/js part should already be feasible. The c++ parts are definitely
> possible, but I don't know how much work would be required. If you don't
> hear from me before, let's say, the end of january, please ping the
> pkg-mozilla-maintainers list, CCing this bug.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mike
>   

Sounds good, thanks.

To be honest, I'd love to see this make it into Debian because the
current state of Mozilla Firefox and KDE integration makes some things a
bit of a UI nightmare. There is no integration with a default
applications registry in KDE, so when trying to open a file a user is
dropped to a file picker. The average user wouldn't know to go to
/usr/bin and find, for example, okular to open a PDF file. </rant>

Anyway, thanks again for your insight in this matter,
P. J.