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

[Andreas Grapentin]

I found at least one significant difference between abrowser and
iceweasel:

> [abrowser] is also modified so that if you install add-ons they use
> the ones on the Trisquel add-on site because the mozilla site
> encourages users to install non-free add-ons

source: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/how-abrowser-different-firefox

do we want that?

We could probably also start our own firefox-libre, cherry picking from
trisquel's patches, or maybe, seeing that nobody else seems to do it,
try and keep iceweasel up to date and have that as 'our' thing. As long
as no additional freedom issues pop up, this should just be a matter of
testing whether the patches still work from the last version, and if
not, modify them slightly. I think I could do that.

Best,

-A

On Sat, Apr 22, 2017 at 10:55:28PM -0300, Megver83 wrote:
> I'm not sure about this migration. I remember that when I used Trisquel's
> abrowser, it was very buggy and many users complained (up to now).
> 
> I do not know if Trisquel's version is the latest, if that is the case, I
> oppose to this migration. However, it could be added to [libre-testing] to
> see how it works, and if it does well, we replace iceweasel with abrowser
> and provide some instructions for a migration of addons and configurations.
> 
> El 22/04/17 a las 12:20, Luke Shumaker escribió:
> > 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 Someone reported via parabolaweb that Iceweasel is out of date, so I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).
> > 
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