ubuntu-desktop depends on totem-mozilla

[Conrad Knauer]

I just upgraded to Edgy and noticed that, similar in effect to Bug #22586 (though of slightly different origin), one cannot remove totem-mozilla (this was not a problem in Dapper :) as it is a dependency of ubuntu-desktop; thus when I install mozilla-mplayer it does me little good since totem-mozilla is handling files and I can't seem to get Firefox to use mozilla-mplayer instead. Uninstalling totem-mozilla would be bad as it would require removing ubuntu-desktop.

Please change
Depends: totem-mozilla
to something like
Depends: totem-mozilla | mozilla-mplayer | mozilla-plugin-vlc
if that's possible, or try to use the solution from Dapper.

[Conrad Knauer (atheoi)]

Or change
Depends: totem-mozilla
to
Recommends: totem-mozilla
which seems like a more elegant solution.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Confirmed by duplicate.

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

+1 here.

[Justin Hayes (wildtangent)]

Confirmed, please fix. This bug is highly annoying.

[Scott Severance (scott.severance)]

I agree. Totem is incompenent software that is unable to play much of what mplayer can. Wht depend on it to the exclusion of better software?

[Conrad Knauer (atheoi)]

I had a flash of insight just now on how to work-around this problem until its fixed; by creating a FAKE totem-mozilla that doesn't actually do anything except convince Ubuntu that totem-mozilla is installed, we can then install the plugin we actually want (e.g. mozilla-mplayer) ^_^

I've attached a DEB; its 808 bytes (really; its that small :) Just double-click on it and gdebi will install it for you; I also made sure that ubuntu-desktop is a dependency so that it will add it back for you if you've removed it to get an alternate plugin working. I tested it on my machine running Feisty and it works just fine.

[Jeroen Vijfhuizen (jeroenvijfhuizen)]

+1

Quite annoying, I did the ugly thing by simply removing the links in the firefox plugins directory, that was the only way of forcing firefox to use the mplayer plugin.

I like this solution:
Depends: totem-mozilla | mozilla-mplayer | mozilla-plugin-vlc

[Pēteris Krišjānis (pecisk-gmail)]

I think it would be nice to have little switch when mozilla-mplayer is installed to ask user to switch video players for browser. In fact, it can be done in mozilla-mplayer package for Ubuntu, via debconf.

[Conrad Knauer (atheoi)]

Oh hey, I just noticed that they fixed it! =D

From the ubuntu-desktop changelog:

---
ubuntu-meta (1.37) feisty; urgency=low

  * Refreshed dependencies
[...]
  * Added totem-mozilla to desktop-recommends-i386, desktop-recommends-
    amd64, desktop-recommends-powerpc, desktop-recommends-ia64, desktop-
    recommends-sparc, desktop-recommends-hppa
[...]
  * Removed totem-mozilla from desktop-i386, desktop-amd64, desktop-
    powerpc, desktop-ia64, desktop-sparc, desktop-hppa
[...]

 -- Matt Zimmerman <email address hidden> Thu, 8 Mar 2007 21:58:46 -0800
---

Spiffy; I'll marked this as fix released.

[Conrad Knauer (atheoi)]

Fixed with ubuntu-desktop 1.37; ubuntu-desktop now just "recommends" totem-mozilla.