Re: Buster's Strange Behaviour Purging Firefox-esr
On Sat 03 Aug 2019 at 09:05:52 (-0700), Patrick Bartek wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Aug 2019 07:09:29 +0200 Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> wrote:
> > On 2019-08-02 21:36 -0700, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> >
> > > Installed Buster (netinstall CD, LXDE desktop ONLY, system-utils) in
> > > Virtualbox 6.0 on Stretch (sysvinit as init) host to test and evaluate.
> > > Firefox-esr, of course, installed by default, but after installing
> > > Google Chrome didn't need it anymore, so . . . When I apt purge
> > > firefox-esr, it was removed and epiphany-browser was installed its
> > > place. ??? Strange. Never had that happen before. When I purged or
> > > removed epiphany-browser, firefox-esr was reinstalled in ITS place.
> > >
> > > If I PINned both not to install, a lot of other files were installed
> > > instead like verious ruby files, zip, vlc, etc. etc. List is way too
> > > long to post here.
> > >
> > > Never, ever had this happen and I purged firefox-esr this way from both
> > > Wheezy and Stretch. It purged as it should have been with nothing
> > > added.
> > >
> > > Anyone got any ideas why this happened? Or is this a nasty, ol' bug?
> >
> > That's almost surely because of libreoffice, whose -help packages depend
> > on particular browsers:
> >
> > ,----
> > | % LANG=C aptitude show libreoffice-help-en-us | grep Depends
> > | Depends: libreoffice-common (= 1:6.3.0~rc2-1), libreoffice-l10n-en-us, libreoffice-help-common (= 1:6.3.0~rc2-1), firefox-esr | epiphany-browser | konqueror | chromium | firefox
> > `----
> >
> > So if you remove firefox-esr it will be replaced by by epiphany-browser,
> > and vice versa. If you uninstall both, apt will choose konqueror as the
> > next alternative which brings in all the other stuff.
> >
> > Here is the relevant changelog entry from libreoffice:
> >
> > ,----
> > | libreoffice (1:6.1.0~rc2-1) experimental; urgency=low
> > | [...]
> > | * debian/rules:
> > | - don't depend on x-www-browser, only "qutebrowser" provides it.
> > | Use firefox-esr | epiphany-browser | konqueror | chromium which is
> > | the order xdg-open (which is used to actually open the help) does, too
> > | (closes: #904022)
> > |
> > | -- Rene Engelhard <rene@debian.org> Thu, 19 Jul 2018 22:17:15 +0000
> > `----
>
> That was it! Purged "help" component which is optional by the
> way, to test if it was, and was able to purge epiphany-browser without
> any gotchas. Strange that Google Chrome isn't an "approved" browser.
> If you're going to have such a dependency, it should be general (that's
> the way I always tried to code) like System Default Browser or Any
> Browser.
>
> LibreOffice Help in 5.2 that I use in Stretch doesn't have the browser
> dependency. but since I never installed Help, I don't know what is used
> to display it.
>
> In any case, I normally have firefox quantum installed along with
> Chrome. So, out of curiosity, I'm going to test if that will satisfy
> the dependency, too.
Are either of chrome and quantum even Debian packages? How can
anything depend on them. OTOH it might be possible to make a dummy
package with /etc/alternatives to satisfy the dependency and still
use your favourite browser in their stead.
Cheers,
David.
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