Arch Linux

From my post on a reddit thread:

"It needs to be a hard dependency because Firefox does not gracefully handle the case of missing GTK2 (it continuously tries to spawn the plugin using /usr/lib/firefox/plugin-container). Moreover, after installing GTK2 the Flash plugin does not work until pluginreg.dat has been deleted."

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/3wxvna/arch_and_firefox_43_and_gtk3/cy02fgh

So foutrelis confirmed on IRC that the first issue does seem to be fixed, and re: the second issue, the flashplugin dependency on gtk2 is sufficient to ensure the pluginreg.dat is correct. :)

I tested this again and the first issue appears to be solved. Firefox doesn't spawn plugin-container forever, it just marks the plugin as invalid upon startup if gtk2 is missing.

Now, about the pluginreg.dat issue, flashplugin is marked as invalid when it's encountered without gtk2. This can't happen since flashplugin depends on gtk2. If flashplugin+gtk2 is installed after firefox's first run, the plugin is correctly recognized and enabled.

Based on the above, gtk2 can be moved to makedepends. IMO it doesn't need to be listed as an optional dependency since the plugins themselves depend on gtk2. (This is the case for flashplugin and npapi-vlc, other plugins use qt4/5 and java.)

FWIW I just hacked the package dropping the GTK2 dependency (+removing GTK2 on my system) and it seems to work fine.

So, could gtk2 be removed from dependencies of all firefox* packages?