Re: Switching to mozilla ESR in stable-security

[Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org>]

Am Donnerstag, den 30.05.2013, 22:29 +0100 schrieb Wookey:
> +++ Josh Triplett [2013-05-29 11:50 -0700]:
> > Moritz Muehlenhoff wrote:
> > > One problematic aspect are the various xul-ext-* packages currently
> > > packaged. It's very likely that some of them will break with ESR17
> > > and ESR24 in the future.
> > >
> > > However, there's not much we can do here. We can select a narrow (!)
> > > set of important addons (e.g. enigmail for Icedove) that we will
> > > keep in sync through stable-security, but that doesn't scale for
> > > the full scale of Mozilla extensions currently packaged.
> > >
> > > In the future the majority of packages should thus rather be installed
> > > through http://addons.mozilla.org instead of Debian packages.
> > 
> > As a user of sid who also maintains various systems running stable, I
> > rely on packages like xul-ext-adblock-plus to make it easier to install
> > specific addons systemwide.  I find it much easier to install those via
> > the Debian packaging system rather than a user-level mechanism that
> > involves running Firefox as one or more target users (or more likely
> > doing the equivalent of creating a xul-ext-* package for local use).  I
> > realize that you can't maintain the full library of Firefox addons as
> > packages, but I'm hoping that some of the most common and popular ones
> > stick around and stay up to date, notably Adblock Plus, HTTPS
> > Everywhere, and It's All Text.
> 
> Absolutely, and I'd like to add lazarus, noscript, ghostery, user-agent
> switcher, and debian-buttons to that list of 'can't-live-without, worth
> maintaining as packages' add-ons. (And Tab Mix Plus is exceedingly
> handy too)
> 
> Obviously if no-one wants to maintain them then I guess we'll have to
> get them the way everyone else does, but I certainly find real value
> in having them packaged, and am pleased every time I can get an add-on
> that way. Do we have helpers (as for CPAN and similar archives) to
> make creation and maintenance of such packages simple?

mozilla-devscript is the helper to create xul-ext packages. It helps
installing the .xpi file in the right place and creates the dependency
lists. We have a wiki page [1] with a usage explanation.

PS: It would be good to have this wiki page content converted to a man
page that we could ship with the mozilla-devscript package. Help doing
this would be appreciated.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/mozilla-devscripts

> If it wasn't too hard I'd be happy to maintain xul-ext-lazarus, for example.

It is simple in most cases. You often just repack the .xpi file.

Do you mean "Lazarus: Form Recovery" with xul-ext-lazarus [my first
connection was the Lazarus IDE for Pascal]? This extension is labeled as
"Freeware" and therefore not DFSG-free. You have to convince upstream to
relicense the package before it can enter the main archive. I don't
think that it makes sense to packaging non-free xul extensions in the
Debian archive.

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer