[Dev] [RFC] Deprecate Parabola Iceweasel in favor of Triquel Abrowser

[Luke Shumaker]

Hi all,

Someone reported via parabolaweb that Iceweasel is out of date, so I
began to look in to how to update it (having been the original
packager of Iceweasel when it first came to Parabola; before handing
it off to Emulatorman).

When I first added Iceweasel, it was by mimicking ConnOS (our then
sister distro), and imported Debian's rebranded Firefox.

  (This had the added benefit that Debian applied portability patches
  to support architectures that Firefox upstream didn't support; this
  was very useful when we had MIPS support)

However, ConnOS no longer exists as an Arch derivative (it shut down
for a while, then came back as a Gentoo derivative), and Iceweasel no
longer exists in Debian; Debian now ships proper Firefox.  I hadn't
realized that about a year ago "Debian Iceweasel" became "Parabola
Iceweasel" and Emulatorman began maintaning the Iceweasel patches
outside of Debian.

Trisquel Abrowser is Trisquel's rebranded Firefox (and is distinct
from (the former?) Ubuntu Abrowser).  It is maintained by quidam, who
is also the maintainer of GNU IceCat.  We always had to maintain a set
of patches *on top of* Debian's patches, to address FSDG concerns; if
we import from Trisquel, that maintenance effort goes away.

  (I also expect this to take care of architecture-patching; Trisquel
  inheritys from Ubuntu which inherits from Debian; but it this isn't
  a sure thing, it is possible that we may have to still deal with
  pathing for ARM.)

I think that it makes sense to cooperate with Trisquel, rather than
duplicate the effort.

As for having both Abrowser and IceCat; Abrowser tracks the latest
Firefox release, IceCat tracks Firefox-ESR (Extended Support Release).

-- 
Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker