The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy [LWN.net]

The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 8, 2006 11:01 UTC (Thu) by jpetso (guest, #36230)
Parent article: The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

This issue shows again how broken that whole "freeze the versions"
concept actually is.

It's a shame that those distros don't even update minor versions
(x.y.1 -> x.y.2) and instead patch everything themselves. I'm actually
surprised that this problem has been able to be ignored for so long, but
sooner or later it has to come up. You can't seriously maintain security
updates for longer than the mainline applications do, and then you're
supposed to upgrade to the next major version, because the previous one
is outdated, unmaintained and plain obsolete anyways.

Security updates for multiple years may be a good idea for server
software and the base system, but it's not viable for desktop
applications. IMHO the users should just bite the bullet and cope with
the implications of a major upgrade. It should not be up to the distro to
maintain what is no longer maintained.

This is my only major gripe against binary distros like (K)Ubuntu. I mean
hey, Gentoo can also provide a stable branch while continuously updating
their software, why can't any of the binary distros do something similar?
Damn those stability gurus.

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The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 8, 2006 12:51 UTC (Thu) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Well, if x.y.1 -> x.y.2 actually is a minor update that only fixes security problems (or horrible crashes, dataloss, etc), then we *do* accept new minor versions. The problem with Firefox, the Linux kernel, etc, is that the diff from x.y.1 to x.y.2 is BIG, and involves a lot more things than just fixes for bugs.

Maybe if you had to work on a distribution with 15000 packages and try to keep them all in sync, you'd understand the necessity of avoiding major changes in stable releases...