Questions about the Iceweasel / Firefox transition

[Raphaël Halimi]

Hi,

First of all, I'd like to say that I'm very happy that the issues
between Mozilla and Debian are now resolved, allowing Firefox to be back
in Debian. It was kind of tiresome to always explain to people whom I
installed Debian desktops for, that "Iceweasel is just like Firefox but
Debian had to change the name because Mozilla wouldn't let them patch
security holes while using the Firefox name and icon because of
trademark issues", etc etc.

Now, for my personal use (and the above-mentioned people), I maintain a
set of meta-packages to install various things, one of them taking care
of the Mozilla suite. So, to get those packages' dependencies right, I
need to have some answers about the transition, but despite some
googling, I couldn't find them, that's why I'm asking them on the
mailing list.

First question: why does the transitional "iceweasel" package in Sid
depend on "firefox-esr" and not "firefox" ? Is it only to ease the
transition in Sid, or will this be permanent and apply to Stretch as well ?

Up to Jessie, Debian provided packages named "iceweasel", only the
version field would contain "esr". It allowed one to simply add the
mozilla.debian.net sources and pin Iceweasel backports to an appropriate
priority to have them installed in place of Debian's packages, so some
users would always have the newest version of Iceweasel, while others
would stick to the esr version provided by Debian. Personally I prefer
this old scheme (same package name with different versions), but if you
decided to change that I'm sure there is a sound reasoning behind this,
which I'd like to know.

Second question, kind of related to the first: if the change will be
permanent, will the various *-desktop packages in Stretch depend on
"firefox" or on "firefox-esr" ?

Third question: will Icedove and Iceowl be replaced as well in the near
future ?

Thanks for answering these questions. Please don't forget to include my
mail address in the replies, as I'm not subscribed to the mailing list.

Regards,

-- 
Raphaël Halimi

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