On Sun 18 Jun 2017 at 00:27:29 -0400, Jape Person wrote: > Apropos of nothing but wishing to supply an explanation to anyone else who > might run into the same issue. > > It is my habit to perform apt update followed by apt full-upgrade every day > on my testing systems. I get the impression that this may not be a common > practice, but I've been doing this (apt full-upgrade or, earlier on, apt-get > dist-upgrade) on a daily basis for years with only rare resulting problems, > all of which have been fixed easily. > > I also routinely run apt --purge autoremove and debfoster to clear out > packages that are no longer needed.
All sensible procedures. > The recent firefox-esr upgrade resulted in the following output in > /var/log/apt/history.log: > > Start-Date: 2017-06-16 10:15:49 > Commandline: apt full-upgrade > Install: libjsoncpp1:amd64 (1.7.4-3, automatic) > Upgrade: firefox-esr:amd64 (45.9.0esr-1, 52.2.0esr-1~deb9u1) > End-Date: 2017-06-16 10:15:54 > > I ran debfoster, and it asked me if I wanted to keep gstreamer1.0-libav. I > ran aptitude why gstreamer1.0-libav and got this result: > > # aptitude why gstreamer1.0-libav > i task-xfce-desktop Recommends libreoffice > i A libreoffice Suggests gstreamer1.0-libav > > Hmmm. Looks like there's no reason to keep gstreamer1.0-libav, so I let > debfoster remove it. debfoster (which I do not use) queries whether you should keep a package which firefox-esr recommends? deborphan doesn't do this. > Following this, no browser on the three testing systems I have (firefox, > epiphany, or qupzilla) would play any kind of video at youtube.com or at any > other location. My main Jessie machine does not install recommended packages; it plays youtube clips within firefox-esr. > Following re-installation of gstreamer1.0-libav all browsers were once again > able to play videos. > > I would have thought that aptitude why might have given me a hint about the > browsers requiring this package. I've looked to be sure the browsers do, > indeed, have all of their depends and recommends installed, and they do. (I > do not install suggests as a rule, and I don't use any kind of proprietary > codecs or player software. So I am dependent upon the DFSG-compliant > software available in the Debian repositories to play any video or audio I'm > going to use on these systems.) > > This is, obviously, not a very serious problem, but it's an interesting one > that might bite others as unwary as I. Maybe it's implicated somehow in some > of the odd reports we see from time-to-time of someone who can't get a > browser to play videos. > > Worthy of a bug report? -- Brian.
