Bug#701102: iceweasel 18 to 19 upgrade changes the Portable Document Format (PDF) preference

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2013-02-21 21:28:31 +0200, Henrik Ahlgren wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 06:40:33PM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> 
> > OK, but it was "Always ask" with Iceweasel 18! An upgrade must
> > preserve the preferences chosen by the user! That may be a RC bug:
> > "local changes must be preserved during a package upgrade".
> 
> AFAIK the built-in viewer is the default setting in 19. Did you
> explicitly set it to be "always ask" (the old default) in the
> system-wide configuration file (/etc/iceweasel/profile/prefs.js)?

No, and unfortunately there was nothing documented about that. After
reading of what was changed in my prefs.js file, I could find more
information (via Google) about this new feature and how to control
it:

  http://aldarone.fr/desactiver-pdf-js-dans-firefox/

(this is in French).

> AFAIK the policy only talks about not overwriting modified system-wide
> configuration files marked as such in the .deb, not per-user dotfiles;

The policy is rather vague and per-user config files seem to follow
the description of "configuration file".

> and I don't think it guarantees that default settings are never
> changed if a new feature is introduced. I think it is a fact of life
> that programs sometimes change behaviour with newer versions.

Sometimes, but in general this is announced in the NEWS file, with
information on how to revert to the old behavior. I think that this
should be done here.

> That said, I compared the rendering of a couple of simple text PDFs
> using the built-in viewer in Iceweasel 19 and evince, and I have to
> agree that the quality of typography is supbar in Iceweasel. Is this
> a Debian (or GNU/Linux) specific problem?

I'm going to answer that in bug 701109.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
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