firefox-appmenu is identical to the firefox snap, but introduces a patch for global menu support on desktop environments like Unity, MATE, KDE and Budgie. Thus, it requires manual review for the same reason as Firefox (see https://github.com/Ubuntu-Unity/firefox-appmenu-snap; fork of the Firefox snap with the appmenu patch added).
Hello @rs2009 , we discourage multiple versions of the same snap. Maybe talk with the upstream firefox snap in order to incorporate those changes. What do you think? Thanks!
That’s extremely unlikely, as the upstream Firefox snap’s developers most probably don’t want any such patches to be included. We were planning to ship this patched Firefox snap in 23.04, so getting it into Firefox itself is not going to possible (since the Feature Freeze for 23.04 is in Februrary)
Unfortunately I don’t think it is tenable to have 2 almost identical snaps in the snap store, particularly when one is officially published by the upstream project and the other is a fork with a minor change. How would you plan on staying up-to-date with security updates etc? This really feels like a poor outcome.
The best option would be to work with the Ubuntu Desktop team (ping @bandali) to see if they can help liase with upstream on how to have this be officially suppported. Perhaps the official firefox snap could provide a content interface that allowed your snap to simply install some configuration into etc which would then enable this functionality if / when your snap is installed in addition to the real firefox snap?
Also you may want to make sure you are not in violation of https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/distribution-policy/ as it appears you are distributing a modified version of firefox which from my layman reading of this policy would appear to not be allowed.
Sure, I’ll get in touch with them. However, I’m not sure if that’s going to be possible as it modifies Firefox’s code (adding support for the appmenu).
I’m not sure if that would be a problem, as many other distros (including Arch and Gentoo) do have a similar firefox-appmenu package (aside from the Firefox package itself).
On top of this concern, I see the snap keeps the original firefox summary, description etc so this is also an issue to discuss with Advocacy (cc @Igor)
Maybe the solution could be to have a fully descriptive name like appmenu-firefox-for-mate? This allows publication of other appmenus without conflicts.
Yep, I have to update that.
This isn’t specific to any particular desktop environment.
Ah, thought you meant a name specific to each DE-specific snap. Yep, I’ll rename the package to something along those lines.
Since this package is named firefox-appmenu in Arch then I don’t think it is that useful to name it firefox-global-appmenu - and would rather keep it as the name that Arch and others use.
I still have concerns about having a second version of such a prominent snap being published in the store, particularly when the official version is published by Mozilla, however, if there is a user demand for such a snap, then I don’t think the store itself should necessarily block it from being published outright.
Coming back to the original point of this thread, this snap requires access to the firefox dbus name, plus the personal-files instance to allow access to ~/.mozilla etc - and so this snap can then access cookies / passwords etc which come from the official firefox snap. So one could argue that as this is not the official firefox it perhaps should not be granted access to this. However, users installing this likely would expect it to be able to function like the regular firefox.
So I am not against this snap being published in the store, but I don’t love the confusion of having two snaps that are basically identical, especially when one is published by the official upstream.
To help with this, can you please update the snap’s description to make it clear that this is an unofficial fork of the original firefox? Also can you please provide details to my earlier question of how you plan to keep up-to-date with security updates etc for this snap? Thanks.
ping @rs2009, can you please provide the required information and update the snap’s description as Alex said
thanks
Hello @rs2009, since we’ve not heard back from you, we are removing this request from our review queue. When you have more time to respond, simply do so here and we can add the request back to the queue. Thanks