Bug#885144: firefox: Please drop dependency on gtk2

Jeremy Bicha jbicha at debian.org
Sun Dec 24 15:35:09 UTC 2017


Source: firefox
Version: 58.0~b4-1

I am working on a goal to have Debian GNOME not ship gtk2 by default
for Buster. (There's some other desktops that might be able to achieve
this too.) The only significant blocker to this in my analysis is
Firefox.

Firefox has only one file that naturally depends on gtk2 which I
believe is only used by the Flash plugin now:
/usr/lib/firefox/gtk2/libmozgtk.so

All the Flash plugin packages in Ubuntu and Debian already depend on libgtk2.0-0
- adobe-flashplugin (Ubuntu only)
- flashplugin-installer (from source flashplugin-nonfree )
- pepperflashplugin-nonfree (works in Chromium not Firefox but
mentioned for completeness)

Therefore, I propose we use the same workaround we've used in several
other packages to drop the depends on gtk2. This has been accepted for
Ubuntu's Firefox 58. See

https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-gnome/gnome-themes-standard.git/commit/?id=4c5691e

The only risk I see is that it is possible for someone to manually try
to install Flash without using the system packages but I don't think
we should worry about that use case.

I am aware of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/1377445 but this issue is
about the binary dependency, not the build depenedency.

By the way, chromium-browser in Debian now depends on gtk3 but not gtk2.

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha



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