Dependency on webbrowser-app seems ill-advised

Robert: can that dependency be turned into a recommend? The underlying code should be able to fallback to another webcontainer (like chrome) if available.

Just to note -
Not sure what was up with the Dash before but "uninstall" on apps is now working.
So in the case of webbrowser-app the uninstall option is front & center & will silently proceed to uninstall unity, ect. along with webbrowser-app package

David, didn't we just rip out the support for firefox & chrome as containers this cycle? I thought the whole point of this dependency is that webbrowser-app is *the* container for doing webapps.

Well if you're getting rid of bamf this cycle then you can ignore this bug, otherwise you can't have your only available session depend on the installation of an easily removed web browser application
I'm sure there is a better, safer way to achieve your purposes.

Whoa now, I didn't say anything about bamf. You're right that uninstalling webbrowser-app should not remove unity, but my understanding is that webapps are completely dead without webbrowser-app. So absolutely uninstalling webbrowser-app should pull out all webapps...

I think the solution to this looks more along the lines of "make unity stop depending on webapps" and less along the lines of "make webapps stop depending on webbrowser-app".

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

It severely affects packages beyond the one that causes the flaw.

The dependency chain here looks like this:

unity -> bamfdaemon -> libunity-webapps0 -> unity-webapps-service -> webapp-container -> webbrowser-app.

My initial feeling was that bamfdaemon just shouldn't depend on libunity-webapps0, because we dropped a bunch of webapps code from bamf following the switch to the container, however upon looking at the code there it seems bamf and libunity-webapps are tightly integrated, so that seemed like a nontrivial task to split.

Then I started looking at the chain and it wasn't clear to me whether unity-webapp-service should stop depending on webapp-container, or whether webapp-container stop depending on webbrowser-app.

I think you are right: we could get rid of the bamf / libunity-webapps link, or at least loosen the dependency between bamf and webapps.

If anybody is interested in helping to test this, the fix is available in this PPA for the time being:

https://launchpad.net/~ci-train-ppa-service/+archive/landing-011

(make sure to disable this PPA after installing, because later on this PPA will contain other, unrelated components that might break your system).

I used the PPA and upgraded bamf. This solved the problem and Unity isn't removed when uninstalling webbrowser-app but as you mentioned in comment #6 the webapps are dead.

$ sudo apt remove webbrowser-app

Czytanie list pakietów... Gotowe
Budowanie drzewa zależności
Odczyt informacji o stanie... Gotowe
Następujące pakiety zostaną USUNIĘTE (REMOVED):
  libunity-webapps0 unity-webapps-common unity-webapps-deezer
  unity-webapps-service webapp-container webbrowser-app xul-ext-unity
  xul-ext-websites-integration
0 aktualizowanych, 0 nowo instalowanych, 8 usuwanych i 0 nieaktualizowanych.
Po tej operacji zostanie zwolnione 3411 kB miejsca na dysku.

Works. +1 for landing

This bug was fixed in the package bamf - 0.5.1+14.04.20140407.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
bamf (0.5.1+14.04.20140407.1-0ubuntu1) trusty; urgency=low

  [ CI bot ]
  * Resync trunk

  [ Alexandre Abreu ]
  * Rip out vestigial webapps code (LP: #1280337) (LP: #1280337)

  [ Ubuntu daily release ]
  * New rebuild forced
 -- Ubuntu daily release <email address hidden> Mon, 07 Apr 2014 23:42:28 +0000

Erk, it seems we have a small goofup here. Nobody bothered to rebuild the silo after Alex pushed more commits, so when I woke up today I saw dbarth's approval and published the silo. Then *after* I did the publish I saw that there were more commits, so I rebuilt and republished.

So, the above version (0.5.1+14.04.20140407.1-0ubuntu1) contains only commit 598 from Alex's branch, which means that (according to Marco) "chromium web-apps will stop working". So the real fix, with all commits included, is coming soon as package version (0.5.1+14.04.20140408-0ubuntu1)

Fix Released in bamf BAMF 0.5.1 "The Trusty BAMF".