Seeking fellow developers feedback for iceweasel in squeeze (transient homepage & upgrade notification)
Hi,
For those not reading debian-release@l.d.o, I planned to include some
further changes to iceweasel before the freeze, except that the freeze
happened earlier than I expected. Anyways, the plan was more or less
accepted by the release team, but now that I actually started to make
the changes, I have mixed feelings on two of them. This is where I'd
appreciate feedback from my fellow developers, and why not, users.
> - Add local homepages when upgrading and running for the first time,
> instead of the pages on http://mozilla.debian.net/
Here the more I think about it, the more I think we need something
different. (Thinking out loud) One of the reasons I wanted to use the
remote server is that it would make it easier to update the content with
news and translations, even though the content is pretty much static at
the moment.
OTOH, it has almost no interest for stable users, except maybe for the
news part, where we could have links pointing at backports for newer
upstream versions or betas.
So maybe these transient homepages (remember they only show up when
the xulrunner version changes, which won't happen in squeeze
stable/security updates or when running iceweasel for the first
time) should just thank users, and point to some useful links/rss
feeds and be done with it.
> - Improve or remove the restart popup that shows up when upgrading the
> package. The main problem it is trying to avoid is the impossibility
> to cleanly close iceweasel after an upgrade. I need to test further,
> but there are chances this is really only needed when upgrading
> between major versions. I'm not entirely sure it has a benefit for
> other cases, though apart from one complaint on planet.debian.org, I
> saw no feedback... there are a bunch of known issues with it, like
> with multiple iceweasel windows, or like not activating again when
> the user doesn't want to restart now but the browser is upgraded
> again
> later.
There is actually another benefit, it's that people who leave iceweasel
opened for a very long time are notified they should restart after a
security update, which is IMHO sensible. I'm not entirely convinced it's
really needed for extensions or plugins, which would make the code and
wording of the popup clearer. As for the major version upgrade problem,
I'm afraid it actually won't help much, as there are cases where either
the quit dialog or the upgrade notification will tentatively show up,
but the underlying file won't be there anymore (like, when the upgrade
involves removing the old xulrunner). And, obviously, as the upgrade
notification thingy is not provided currently in lenny, these changes
would only make a difference for squeeze->squeeze+1 upgrades (or
squeeze->backports, or backports->squeeze, for that matter).
One way I can think of to alleviate the problem when the old xulrunner
is removed would be to have the upgrade notification UI part of a
separate package, and installed in the shared location for extensions
(though it would need to be somewhere that works for conkeror, too, and
shouldn't break other applications such as icedove, that don't have the
necessary binary component)
Any feedback appreciated on both subjects.
Mike
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