How to remove Firefox?

[Jordan Mantha]

On 9/4/07, Jim Kronebusch <jim at winonacotter.org> wrote:
<snip>
>  But now I go to remove
> firefox after edubuntu-desktop is already gone and it wants to remove the following:
>
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   edubuntu-docs firefox firefox-gnome-support firefox-libthai gnome-user-guide gramps
> language-support-th sun-java6-plugin ubuntu-docs ubuntu-restricted-extras yelp

These packages depend on the rendering engine (gecko) included in
firefox (this is the case for yelp which is needed by edubuntu-docs
and gnome-user-guide) or firefox itself (sun-java6-plugin is the java
plugin for firefox).

> I don't get why without firefox I can't have restricted-extras, yelp, the documentation
> for Ubuntu, sun-java, gramps, and language-support-th.  I would think that all of these
> applications should be independent of firefox.  So now Ubuntu is treating firefox like
> Microsoft treats Internet Explorer and is forcing me to keep it.  Okay, so I can "hide"
> it with Sabayon, but why am I forced to keep it for applications that should not have to
> rely on it?  This doesn't seem like the freedom of Linux way, does it?

Well, not to be too picky, but this is done *everywhere* in
Linux/Ubuntu. Libraries and dependencies  allow us to build off of
other people's work. It just happens that the necessity of this
dependency here is not clear to you (which makes sense, it's not
obvious). There is quite an amount of work trying to grab out the
gecko engine without having to have all of firefox. You might want to
google around for xulrunner.

> I am fine, and can find a workaround, but this doesn't seem right to me.  I don't feel I
> should be forced to use any application with the exception of real dependencies.  I can
> understand that if I want to install program x and it needs program y to run properly, I
> have to install y to use x.  But if x doesn't need y, then why should I have it?

Because in this case they *do* need firefox. That's the whole point of
having the dependencies.

-Jordan