Firefox and Mozilla Update

[Zach]

On 9/14/05, Ian Jackson <ian at davenant.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

>  * Mozilla's system does not appear to have a way to deinstall a piece
>    of software for which support (including, of course, security
>    support) has been withdrawn.  What should we do about this ?

I don't know how technically difficult the following would be, but it
would be great if there were a mechanism that could somehow intercept
the installation of third party plugins like flash, and create a deb
package *LOCALLY* and install the deb.  This would facilitate two
things: (1) clean, complete, and verifiable removal of the software,
and (2) verifying the integrity of installed software, both of which
are difficult outside of the package system.

An obvious question that will no doubt come to mind is of the legality
of such a thing.  Of course the exact wording of licenses and terms of
use would have to be checked, but intuitively, it seems reasonable as
long as the package is being created, installed and stored locally at
each machine, and not distributed in any way.