Questions about the Iceweasel / Firefox transition

[Mike Hommey]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 06:53:57PM +0100, Raphaël Halimi wrote:
> 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.

Debian cannot release Firefox in stable, because every 6 to 8 weeks
there is an entirely new release. What Debian can release in stable is
Firefox ESR. So iceweasel transitions to the latter because it's what is
going to be released.

Now, we could keep the same scheme as before, but it had its downside as
well: unstable needed to stay at the same version as stable, with the
exception of the transition period between esr n and esr n+7, and
release versions would go in experimental. Which a) is confusing, and b)
would not allow to easily build and test beta releases on all Debian
architectures, to be ahead of time.

> 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" ?

That's not a question I can answer.

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

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=816679

Mike