Bug#815006: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

[Alan Jenkins]

On Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:21:44 +0100 Moritz Muehlenhoff <jmm at inutil.org> 
wrote:
 > On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 09:46:59PM +0900, Mike Hommey wrote:
 > > For clarity, do you mean you're fine with a iceweasel->firefox-esr
 > > transition in stable(jessie) when we upgrade to 45? (which will be 
by 45.2,
 > > at the beginning of June)
 >
 > It's likely a lot easier on your side if we do that, right?
 >
 > It might actually even also be simpler for us, since we wouldn't need 
to track two
 > different source package names for several years.
 >
 > If the respective transition packages are in place, that seems acceptable
 > to me (after all we had a in comparison more drastic UI change 
between ESR24
 > and ESR31).

I found this thread while checking when I should expect weasel-ESR31 to 
go (and when to worry if it doesn't).

I'm fine with this idea in principle.  However, some users will be 
surprised by transitional packages _within_ a stable release. Upgrading 
to a transitional package does not happen when "apt-get upgrade" is used.

I _think_ it'll be ok for many people because PackageKit does 
"dist-upgrade".  PK may prompt about installing additional packages 
(which is sub-optimal, but about par for Debian on the desktop). 
Unfortunately there *are* some setups which will fail this.

---

It looks like `unattended-upgrades` uses `apt-get update`. 
`unattended-upgrades` does include modes designed for desktop systems.

[1] 
http://askubuntu.com/questions/251303/how-to-automatically-install-updates-before-shutdown

I get paranoid about this, because my experience is both Debian 7 and 8 
installs lack working update notifications.

[2] 
http://blog.tenstral.net/2015/09/update-notifications-in-debian-jessie.html

This means a) I notice some desktop QA problem, so I should try to 
contribute to it; b) some desktops which _do_ have working update 
notifications will have been randomly hacked until they seemed to work.  
E.g. using unattended-upgrades as per the first link above :(.

I don't have a suggestion, other than strongly recommend PK & making 
sure it's working.  Just sharing the pain that flared up again when 
reading your words :-P.  Fortunately Stretch fixes gnome update 
notifications, at least when I last tested.

---

There was eventually a recommended backport (apt-config-auto-update), as 
a good hack to make PK work (about as well as update-manager used to).  
So that would be fine for transitional packages.  Other users may have 
switched back to update-manager.  I _hope_ that's ok due to coming from 
Ubuntu, where they assume "dist-upgrade" is used e.g. to get kernel updates.

Synaptic is also installed by default, and does not `dist-update`. It 
does not provide a prompt, but it does warn.  Apparently the warning 
includes the package names, so it should be _relatively_ obvious.

It looks like "apt-get update" is also used by the example configuration 
for `cron-apt`.  (Whereas apticron looks to use dist-upgrade).  If 
either of these kick off while Firefox is running, Firefox will crash.  
(The Chrome people have a whole rant about this :D).  So I don't expect 
updates-from-cron to be too common on desktops.

Regards
Alan