Bug#815006: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Package: iceweasel
Version: 45.0~b5-1
Severity: normal


The goal of this bug is to rename Iceweasel in Firefox.

The various issues mentioned in bug #354622 have been now tackled.


= Actors =
Mike Hommey is one of the most prolific Mozilla developer in term of number
of commits (in the top 10). He is also a Mozilla employee. He has been
maintaining Firefox/Iceweasel in Debian since 2004.

Mike Connor is leading the partner efforts at Mozilla.

Sylvestre Ledru is leading the Mozilla release management & stability teams.
He is also involved in Debian since 2006.

Stefano Zacchiroli has been the Debian Project Leader for 3 years (2010
to 2013) and he has been part of Debian/Mozilla conversations since then.


= About the Debian specific patches =

Mozilla recognizes that patches applied to Iceweasel/Firefox don't
impact the quality of the product.
Patches which should be reported upstream to improve the product always
have been forward upstream by the Debian packagers. Mozilla agrees about
specific patches to facilitate the support of Iceweasel on architecture
supported by Debian or Debian-specific patches.

More generally, Mozilla trusts the Debian packagers to use their best
judgment to achieve the same quality as the official Firefox binaries.

In case of derivatives of Debian, Firefox branding can be used as long
as the patches applied are in the same category as described above.
Ubuntu having a different packaging, this does not apply to that
distribution.


= About stable releases =

Mozilla releases new Firefox releases every 6 to 8 weeks.
In parallel of these rapid releases, Mozilla proposes a version called
ESR which is maintained for about 9 months.
On the contrary, Debian having a longer release cycle (about every two
years), release cycles don't align.
Because of the complexity of backporting security fixes, Debian cannot
maintain a deprecated ESR release.

To address this packaging issue, once a ESR cycle is over, Debian has
been accepting uploads of new ESR releases in the stable release.


= About branding =
Mozilla & Debian both acknowledge that the branding issue mentioned in
bug 354622 is
no longer relevant.
The Firefox logo was released under a free copyright license which
matches the DFSG.


= About Debian stable =
To simplify the maintenance of the current stable Debian release, the name
iceweasel will remain.
Debian Stretch, the next release, will have Firefox as package name.


= About Icedove/Thunderbird =
Similar discussions with the icedove maintainers have just started to do the same
for this package.

The attached patch implements the changes.


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