[Dev] update your-freedom not to reject firefox

Luke Shumaker lukeshu at lukeshu.com
Wed Sep 13 01:53:24 GMT 2017


On Tue, 12 Sep 2017 20:10:17 -0400,
bill-auger wrote:
> as far as i know debian did very little or no modifications to firefox

I don't know how it's been recently (I've been away from our Mozilla
packaging for several years), but when we first added Iceweasel; well:
more of the changes from plain Firefox were coming from Debian than
from us/ConnOS.

Now, except for branding, our changes were more visible.  Debian's
non-branding changes were more along the lines of bugfixes and
portability fixes.  Firefox had not supported MIPS since version 4,
and so Debian had built up a good chunk of patches to get it working
on MIPS.  Which was significant for us, because Parabola still
supported MIPS back then; so we'd been stuck shipping an ancient
version of IceCat 3 on MIPS.

> other than re-branding; so "dis-continuing" iceweasel and changing it
> back to "pure" firefox was a political change only and utterly trivial,
> practically speaking

It's been a bit since I looked at it, but I believe that still still
makes all of the modifications that they were, except for branding.
It's just that now Mozilla has said that they trust Debian's changes
to be in line with Mozilla's vision and quality standards.

>                      - they still maintain the branding package btw; so
> that anyone who wants iceweasel on debian can pretend that it was never
> "dis-continued" transparently

I was about to disagree with you.  On oldstable (Jessie), stable
(Stretch), and testing (Buster), the 'iceweasel' package just provides
/usr/bin/iceweasel, and it runs a non-rebranded Firefox.  Of course,
oldoldstable (Wheezy) still hasn't removed the branding.  But what's
weird to me is that the branding also *does* exist on unstable (Sid).
*shrugs*

> more to the point of the OP is that parabola makes some modifications
> that debian never did and; that is still the reason why mozilla would
> not allow parabola to call their browser "firefox"

That is true.  Having it direct to anywhere FSDG-friendly instead of
addons.mozilla.org would automatically mean that they'd never approve
our modifications.

-- 
Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker



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