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}

[Mike Hommey]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 02:51:30PM +0200, Axel Beckert wrote:
> 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?

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.dev.platform/xulrunner/mozilla.dev.platform/o99wQZBjIJw/4eBoWbjEzjAJ

Yes, I started that thread.

> The docs upstream are then probably out of date: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.

That's an old page. And in fact, while Fedora used to be the other linux
distro using Firefox on XULRunner, they stopped doing that, making, in
fact, Debian the only remaining one.

> > 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.

As I wrote in the mozilla.dev.platform post, firefox -app is essentially
99% like xulrunner, except for a few details that should be considered
bugs.

> > 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...

That's a simplified view of the problem.

> > 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. :-)

You're just fortunate not to have had problems.

Mike