language support app automatically installs firefox deb package (21.10)

[Jacob van der Eynden]

Ubuntu 21.10
language-selector 0.216

If the initial 'Language support is not installed completely' prompt on opening the app is accepted, the Firefox deb package will be installed alongside the default Firefox snap package, resulting in two installations of Firefox on the computer. This happens even though, in my case, only the 'gimp-help-en' package is listed for installation, and 'firefox' does not seem to be a dependency of it.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thanks for your report. I can reproduce it on impish.

When trying on jammy, I get another result though... It installs lynx instead of Firefox. :/

I think this has something to do with the virtual package www-browser.

$ apt-cache show gimp-help-en | grep Depends
Depends: gimp-help-common (= 2.10.0-1), gimp-helpbrowser | www-browser

Apparently the Firefox snap does not provide the www-browser virtual package, and hence is not recognized as a web browser by the gimp-help-* packages.

So on jammy:

$ lsb_release -ds
Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish (development branch)
$ sudo apt-get install www-browser | head -5
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Package www-browser is a virtual package provided by:
  lynx:i386 2.9.0dev.10-1
E: Package 'www-browser' has no installation candidate

(i.e. Lynx first in the list)

And on impish:

$ lsb_release -ds
Ubuntu 21.10
$ sudo apt-get install www-browser | head -5
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Package www-browser is a virtual package provided by:
  firefox 94.0+build3-0ubuntu0.21.10.1
E: Package 'www-browser' has no installation candidate

(i.e. Firefox first in the list)

I guess it would be possible to add some "hack" to language-selector to fix the specific issue as reported in this bug. But we should probably try to find a more proper fix, where the Firefox snap actually is recognized as a web browser by the system.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

it's going to be resolved when the firefox deb is turned into a snap installer this cycle, the issue is similar to bug #1947600

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Another related discussion:

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/firefox-snap-cannot-be-set-as-default-browser/26636

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.