Comment 6 for bug 486079

More specifically: the runtime package xulrunner-1.9.1 may today contain /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1.5/libmozjs.so, but tomorrow may contain /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1.6/libmozjs.so. So any application built against the first (e.g. using LD_RUN_PATH) will stop working when xulrunner is upgraded.

xulrunner will be a suitable production replacement for libmozjs when it's installed in a stable location, preferably under /usr/lib.

In the mean time: libmozjs.so from the libmozjs package continues to work just fine. I see no reason to continue the underlying problem reported here, which is that libmozjs-dev has superfluous conflicts declared. All this achieves is that it's impossible to install libmozjs-dev on an ubuntu-desktop machine without uninstalling a load of important stuff.

Note that on ubuntu-server, where you typically don't have firefox installed, libmozjs-dev installs just fine, and you can then build stuff which links against libmozjs. Such compiled code would then *run* just fine on an ubuntu-desktop machine, because you can install the libmozjs package without problems.

So why declare a conflict on libmozjs-dev but not on libmozjs?