mail-client/thunderbird-bin-5.0 unconditionally RDEPENDs on net-misc/curl[nss]. As that config caused bug #380119 for me, I've tried to figure out the reason behind this dependency. http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/system-requirements/ does not mention curl at all. So apparently it is no official dependency of current thunderbird releases. Digging through the CVS commits, it appears that the 3.0.1 ebuild first introduced that dependency, conditionally for x86 only at first: http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/mail-client/mozilla-thunderbird-bin/mozilla-thunderbird-bin-3.0.1.ebuild?hideattic=0&revision=1.1&view=markup Before that, there was a check in pkg_postinst which generated a warning in the opposite case: it advised users AGAINST having curl[nss] installed: http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/mail-client/mozilla-thunderbird-bin/mozilla-thunderbird-bin-3.0.ebuild?hideattic=0&revision=1.2&view=markup Both ChangeLog and CVS commit message have "version bump" as the only information related to this change, attributed to anarchy (Jory A. Pratt). So I assume that the negation of this check was a mistake, which was carried into later ebuilds without any verification. The conditional on x86 was apparently dropped in the bump to 5.0, and the first mention I found was in bug #373159 comment #1. Apparently there was no discussion about this dependency there either. Please have a look at this, see if you can find any valid reason for this dependency, both on curl itself and on its nss USE flag. If there is one, find a suitable place to document it, either in the ebuild or the ChangeLog. Otherwise please drop the dependency or restore the original meaning by turning it into a blocker instead.
Invalid, we are ensuring that upstream crashreporter works as they expect it too, hense the dep is mandatory.
But it works as expected with curl[-nss] … I tried it just now, the report was submitted successfully.
I've exchanged some emails with Jory Pratt, and will try to summarize them here for reference. TB doesn't need curl for normal operations, but the crash reporter needs curl[ssl] to connect to https error reporting resources. Apparently this led Jory to consider the nss flag a requirement, but led me to prefer a dependency on the ssl flag instead. Jory says the mozilla herd is lacking manpower to support the binary packages, so excessive bickering about this bug here might get it resolved by removal of said binary packages. He promised to have another look if time permits, which apparently hasn't been the case yet. By the way, I noticed today that the firefox-bin ebuild still warns users against curl[nss], the way the thunberbird-bin ebuilds did up to 3.0.
