On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 12:12 PM, Enrico Zini <enr...@debian.org> wrote: > That the equivs package works so well, makes a pretty good case to me > that the chrome-gnome-shell should be brought in by a Recommends: rather > than a Depends:
Thank you for taking the time to file this bug and help make Debian better. Let me provide a bit of background: One of GNOME 3's most popular and iconic features since the beginning has been GNOME Shell Extensions. Traditionally, users have been able to manage extensions (install, uninstall, change extension settings) by visiting https://extensions.gnome.org/ via Firefox. GNOME Shell itself included a Firefox addon to help this work. But then Google pushed browsers to stop supporting NPAPI extensions. GNOME Shell's addon will stop working whenever users upgrade past Firefox 52 ESR (either already if they're using non-ESR builds or in a few months when Firefox 60 ESR is pushed to everyone). Therefore, Debian GNOME intentionally installs chrome-gnome-shell in Debian 9 "Stretch" by default to prevent a regression from reaching Debian Stable users who expect to be able to use https://extensions.gnome.org/ like they always have been able to. (Despite the name, chrome-gnome-shell supports Firefox and other browsers too.) However, as of GNOME 3.26, I believe GNOME upstream prefers users to install and uninstall extensions from the GNOME Software app and manage them with the GNOME Tweaks app. Since those apps are already pre-installed for users of the 'gnome' metapackage, I think we can lower the dependency in Debian Testing now. Thanks, Jeremy Bicha
