On 2019-08-02 21:36 -0700, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> Installed Buster (netinstall CD, LXDE desktop ONLY, system-utils) in
> Virtualbox 6.0 on Stretch (sysvinit as init) host to test and evaluate.
> Firefox-esr, of course, installed by default, but after installing
> Google Chrome didn't need it anymore, so . . . When I apt purge
> firefox-esr, it was removed and epiphany-browser was installed its
> place. ??? Strange. Never had that happen before. When I purged or
> removed epiphany-browser, firefox-esr was reinstalled in ITS place.
>
> If I PINned both not to install, a lot of other files were installed
> instead like verious ruby files, zip, vlc, etc. etc. List is way too
> long to post here.
>
> Never, ever had this happen and I purged firefox-esr this way from both
> Wheezy and Stretch. It purged as it should have been with nothing
> added.
>
> Anyone got any ideas why this happened? Or is this a nasty, ol' bug?
That's almost surely because of libreoffice, whose -help packages depend
on particular browsers:
,----
| % LANG=C aptitude show libreoffice-help-en-us | grep Depends
| Depends: libreoffice-common (= 1:6.3.0~rc2-1), libreoffice-l10n-en-us,
libreoffice-help-common (= 1:6.3.0~rc2-1), firefox-esr | epiphany-browser |
konqueror | chromium | firefox
`----
So if you remove firefox-esr it will be replaced by by epiphany-browser,
and vice versa. If you uninstall both, apt will choose konqueror as the
next alternative which brings in all the other stuff.
Here is the relevant changelog entry from libreoffice:
,----
| libreoffice (1:6.1.0~rc2-1) experimental; urgency=low
| [...]
| * debian/rules:
| - don't depend on x-www-browser, only "qutebrowser" provides it.
| Use firefox-esr | epiphany-browser | konqueror | chromium which is
| the order xdg-open (which is used to actually open the help) does, too
| (closes: #904022)
|
| -- Rene Engelhard <r...@debian.org> Thu, 19 Jul 2018 22:17:15 +0000
`----
Cheers,
Sven
