No more xulrunner? / iceweasel 30.0~b3-1~bpo70+1 and 31.0~a2+20140511004003-1~bpo70+1 contain broken link to xulrunner-{30,31}

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Mike,

Mike Hommey wrote:
> Xulrunner is heavily unsupported upstream, to the point that it's going
> to be removed entirely.

Is there already any official statement from Mozilla about such plans?

The docs upstream are then probably out of date:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XULRunner_FAQ

| When will Firefox be based on XULRunner?
|    There is no intention to do this for official release versions of
|    Firefox. It is already possible to run Firefox on XULRunner now
|    though and certain Linux distributions already do this.

E.g. the word "already" suggests that this is rather the future than
the past.

> Xulrunner functionality can be achieved with
> iceweasel/firefox -app foo.ini.

>From my experience this has more issues than running xulrunner
directly.

http://bugs.conkeror.org/issue384 may be such an issue. (Will ask the
submitter if it still persist.)

IIRC there were other issues like wrong User-Agent name or similar.
(That issue was at least visible in "about:". Will recheck with
30/31 and report a bug if it's still there.)

Hence, I always considered "firefox -app" just as an ugly workaround
e.g. on Ubuntu which shipped upstream releases instead of taking
Iceweasel + Xulrunner from Debian.

> Separately from the issue of xulrunner being supported or not upstream,
> the situation with security updates basically makes us break all things
> using xulrunner in stable releases once every 42 weeks.

Well, if Mozilla would have a saner release policy and (real)
long-term stable APIs instead of running after Google Chrome...

> Mike (also an advocate of Mozilla killing xulrunner for good, because
> pretending that it works is more a disservice than anything else)

Xulrunner worked fine for me for many years now (started with
Xulrunner 1.8.something which IIRC correlates with Firefox 2.0) and
still does so. I consider it anything else than a "disservice". The
packages seemed well maintained and it seems to have less issues than
iceweasel itself. (To be fair, there is also less functionality that
could have issues. :-)

There was only one release which I considered broken (Xulrunner 14) as
it was unusable with Conkeror (hence the one dent in conkeror's
alternative dependencies list). But since Xulrunner 15 worked fine
again...

The only thing I was annoyed about with regards to packaging was that
there never was a xulrunner meta package, not even a "Provides:
xulrunner". But I suspect _that_ issue is solved now. .oO( "Depends:
iceweasel" *sigh* )

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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