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Re: Will IceWeasel be based on a fork or on vanilla FireFox?



Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 15, 2006 at 10:06:21PM +0200, Bastian Venthur wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've read on several blogs that IceWeasel will be based on a fork of
>> FireFox and not just on vanilla FireFox. Is this true and if yes, why?
>>
>> I hope this will not result in a flamewar, I'm just interested in the
>> reasons if an why we prefer the fork over the original source as base
>> for our IceWeasel.
>>
> It will be a fork in the following senses:
> 
>  * no inclusion of trademarked Mozilla artowrk
>  * backporting of security fixes to declared stable version

Wouldn't it be easier to just do the usual .dfsg-dance with the original
upstream tarball? I still fail to see why we need a fork as a layer
between upstream and us.

> 
> Beyond that, they will be basically identical.

Looks* like "gnuzilla" already has made some changes in their fork and I
fear both versions will diverge more and more over time. I think this is
definitely not what our users want.

BTW: Will IceDove be based on a fork too? If not, why?


Cheers,

Bastian


* Quote from http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/ :

"IceWeasel also includes some privacy protection features:

   1. Some sites refer to zero-size images on other hosts to keep track
of cookies. When IceWeasel detects this mechanism it blocks cookies from
the site hosting the zero-length image file. (It is possible to
re-enable such a site by removing it from the blocked hosts list.)
   2. Other sites rewrite the host name in links redirecting the user to
another site, mainly to "spy" on clicks. When this behavior is detected,
IceWeasel shows a message alerting the user."


-- 
Bastian Venthur
http://venthur.de



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