Dropping support for Mozilla suite?

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Nov 21, 2004 at 04:55:24PM +0200, Simon Taplin wrote:
> Martin Pitt wrote:
> >In Tuesday's community we discussed about the future of Mozilla. The
> >Mozilla foundation seems to fade out support for the legacy Mozilla
> >suite (packages mozilla-browser and mozilla-mailnews) in favor of the
> >splitted new FireFox and Thunderbird packages.
> >
> >Therefore we would like to confine our attention to the new programs
> >and drop support for Mozilla in Hoary if there are no serious
> >regressions.
> >
> >So we have a question to the community: are there any advantages that
> >you see for Mozilla that FireFox/Thunderbird do not have? Would you
> >seriously miss Mozilla if we dropped support for it?
> 
> I woundn't miss Mozilla on the actual installation CD but it would be 
> nice for it to still be available on the universe.

That will definitely be the case, whatever we do (unless Debian drop
support for it too, which I don't see happening in the near future).

There are three options:

  1) keep mozilla-browser on CD

  2) drop mozilla-browser from CD

  3) drop mozilla-browser from CD and main, demoting it to universe

I certainly favour at least 2), since the CD size has already grown by
about 10 MB since the Warty release and we can't keep that growth rate
up for very long before it starts to become a serious problem at least
on powerpc. Cutting out major duplication of functionality would help.
I'm personally not too bothered about 3) one way or the other, although
it would certainly be one fewer enormous complex application for the
core development team to support; the question is whether enough of our
users need the support.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                    [cjwatson at canonical.com]