Should we remove chromium-browser from the archive?

[Olivier Tilloy]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 8:38 PM Thomas Ward <teward at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> Not to mention, the rdepends of the package:
>
> # apt-cache rdepends chromium-browser
> chromium-browser
> Reverse Depends:
>   chromium-browser-l10n
>   gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect-browsers
>  |gnome-core
>   chromium-chromedriver
>   chrome-gnome-shell
>   chrome-gnome-shell
>
> We'd have to do some erasure of some packages (potentially transitional) and some other packages as well as a few shell extensions in order to make this removal work I think.

chromium-browser-l10n and chromium-chromedriver are built from the
same chromium-browser source package.

gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect-browsers and chrome-gnome-shell only
suggest chromium-browser, it's not a hard dependency.

gnome-core does depend on chromium-browser, but it's OR'ed with other browsers:
    firefox-esr (>= 78) | firefox (>= 78) | chromium |
chromium-browser | epiphany-browser

At this point it looks like the benefits of keeping the package in the
archive largely outweigh those of removing it anyway.


> On 2/8/22 14:29, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
>
> Hi Olivier!
>
> On 2022-02-08 19:33, Olivier Tilloy wrote:
>
> The chromium-browser package has been a "transitional" package that
> installs the chromium snap since Ubuntu 19.10. Full-fledged deb
> packages are still being built for 18.04.
>
> The question of whether to remove this transitional package from the
> archive altogether has come up, so I'm sharing it here to get insights
> and feedback from a wider audience before making an informed decision.
>
> Some features of the deb package that are worth taking into account:
>   - /usr/bin/{chromium-browser,chromedriver} symlinks to their snap counterparts
>   - a postinst script that installs alternatives for x-www-browser and
> gnome-www-browser (unfortunately snapd doesn't have any mechanism for
> this yet)
>   - a custom apport hook that collects additional information about the
> snap and its dependencies
>   - did I miss any other features?
>
>
> Can't tell, but those are important enough, aren't they?
>
> Your message made me think of bugs like these:
>
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/1947600
>
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/1950550
>
> And today I had a reason to install xsane.
>
> $ apt-cache show xsane | grep Recommends
> Recommends: cups-client, firefox | www-browser
>
> As you see it pulled the Firefox .deb even if I have the Firefox snap installed.
>
> So as long as there is no other mechanism to make the system recognize the FF snap and/or the Chromium snap as a www-browser, I suppose we need such transitional packages. (Waiting for the FF equivalent.)
>
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