Bug#818101: Broken icon / application tracking after upgrade to 45.0esr-2

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2016 at 18:21:13 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Or is this solely for users which e.g. have dragged iceweasel.desktop on
> their launcher and you don't want to break that reference?

I'd assumed it was for people who did that, or made iceweasel.desktop their
default browser (default pseudo-content-type handler for x-scheme/http),
or made it their default handler for text/html, or used it anywhere else
that uses .desktop filenames as a unique identifier. When I upgraded
firefox-esr to 45.0esr-1 (the version without iceweasel.desktop),
my default browser briefly got switched to Chromium because I didn't
have an iceweasel.desktop any more.

If .desktop files had a standard way to express "is a deprecated alias for",
it could use that, but they don't (although I think GNOME upstream have
wondered about introducing such a mechanism for foo -> org.gnome.Foo
upgrades.)

    S