No more xulrunner? / iceweasel 30.0~b3-1~bpo70+1 and 31.0~a2+20140511004003-1~bpo70+1 contain broken link to xulrunner-{30,31}

[Mike Hommey]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 02:19:46AM +0200, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> both, iceweasel 30.0~b3-1~bpo70+1 and 31.0~a2+20140511004003-1~bpo70+1
> contain broken link at /usr/lib/iceweasel/xulrunner to ../xulrunner-30
> respectively ../xulrunner-31, but there are no more xulrunner packages
> anymore, hence those links are dead.
> 
> The latest xulrunner-30 packages I got was 30.0~b2-1~bpo70.
> 
> The changelog of recent iceweasel packages reads:
> 
>   * […] debian/xulrunner*: Removed.
>   […]
>   * […] Revert changes that are irrelevant now that Iceweasel is not a
>     xulrunner application.
> 
> I don't care how iceweasel works internally since I don't use
> iceweasel, but what does now happen to programs which are still
> xulrunner applications and hence depend on xulrunner?

Xulrunner is heavily unsupported upstream, to the point that it's going
to be removed entirely. Xulrunner functionality can be achieved with
iceweasel/firefox -app foo.ini. There may or may not be a stub in the
future that allows the same as xulrunner-stub allowed. That hasn't been
decided yet.

Separately from the issue of xulrunner being supported or not upstream,
the situation with security updates basically makes us break all things
using xulrunner in stable releases once every 42 weeks.

For these reasons, I'm phasing xulrunner out of debian.

Mike (also an advocate of Mozilla killing xulrunner for good, because
pretending that it works is more a disservice than anything else)