The return of Iceweasel [LWN.net]

The return of Iceweasel

Posted Sep 25, 2006 23:11 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: The return of Iceweasel by dlang
Parent article: The return of Iceweasel

Did you mean 'No version changes' policy?

Makes perfect sense to me. With Free software and probably any other software stuff authors don't realy have a very good track record of not breaking something. Changing dependancies, changing configuration files. Introducing new bugs.

With Debian Stable it's stable as in 'unchanging'.

I mean with people's experiances in other distros it would seem obvious...
Like how my brother was using Ubuntu I installed for him.
Time to update his system to keep it secure.. like I told him too.

So he updates.. and now firefox is broken. Ok.. fixed that for him.
Later on he updates.. and now X is broken. Ok.. fixed that for him.
Later on he updates.. and now something else is broken.

It's a never ending cycle.

Same thing with Fedora. They do huge updates of X right mid-life of the distro. How the hell does that make sense? What is the point of doing releases at all if your going to do that? It would be easier on the users just to track changes to 'Fedora Core Forever' and get breakage in small bite sized portions.

Same thing with every other distro that I've ever used. If they do version changes mid-life of the distro then stuff gets broken. There is a reason why authors do have versions. Because different versions are pretty much different programs. Sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways.

I don't realy mind that a whole lot most of the time.

On a personal desktop, who cares? I like having new versions. But if it's a machine that I just want to keep running why would I want to fix stuff when I shouldn't have to? So I like it when distros backport security fixes.

Of course I know it's not a automatic fix for breakage coming from updates.. Bad things still happen. But it's a good start.

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The return of Iceweasel

Posted Sep 25, 2006 23:53 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

that's the policy I'm referring to.

in and of itself it can be a good thing.

however prior articles here on LWN about firefox upgrades on Debian have stated that debian developers decided that backporting mozilla patches was too hard and so they re-branded the new version as the old version number as the 'patch'

If this is no longer being done then good for them.

however, given the number of changes that are takeing place in firefox (many in response to holes discovered in it) updateing the old version to fix all the bugs found in the new version sounds like a nearly impossible task (similar to backporting all bugfixes in the kernel to a prior version, once the versions diverge more then a little bit the patches no longer apply to both cleanly)

The return of Iceweasel

Posted Sep 27, 2006 17:05 UTC (Wed) by Lovechild (subscriber, #3592) [Link]

Do we really have to listen to this Fedora X update FUD again, it was proposed and considered like any update request followed by a rejection. Fedora don't do massive updates aside the kernel but that's a rather special case and DaveJ does an amazing job keeping the bugcount down (backporting fixes of any kind in the kernel is timeconsuming compared to rebasing and less error prone).