Re: GNU IceCat?

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Simon Josefsson writes ("Re: GNU IceCat?"):
> What's a good way to do that efficiently?   People have submitted bugs
> against Iceweasel to do some of the things that IceCat does by default,
> for example https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=654336

Well, a good start would be to turn bugs
  Severity: wishlist
into bugs
  Severity: wishlist
  Tags: patch
?

I'm not surprised that the Iceweasel team don't have much time for
anything which isn't strictly essential.  A well-tested and maintained
and maintainable patch would make it more feasible.

> The normal approach in that situation is to also package the fork of
> the projects to give users a choice, similar to what's done with
> MariaDB/MySQL.

I don't think this is a good engineering solution for a situation
where what we're talking about is essentially different configuration,
rather than a different codebase.

If you do find that the Iceweasel maintainers are not interested
enough in your goals, then a better engineering solution might be an
overlay package which overrides some of the configuration defaults.

(If there is currently no good mechanism for such an overlay package,
that is a generically useful thing which I would expect both Debian's
Iceweasel people and indeed upstream Mozilla to welcome.)

Ian.