Speedy Fedora updates [LWN.net]

Last week a small rant was posted to the fedora-advisory-board mailing list, wondering why Fedora had not issued an update for security issues fixed in Firefox 1.5.0.5. For the record, updates for Fedora Core 5 were already in the works at that time. Both Firefox and Thunderbird updates were released very soon after the rant was posted.

It turns out that Red Hat has one over-worked developer handling all Mozilla products for all releases from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 through Fedora Core 6 development. Whew! It also seems that a problem with S/390 builds delayed the Fedora Core 5 update (even though that architecture is only supported by RHEL, not Fedora).

According to the LWN vulnerability report, an advisory for the RHEL 3 Seamonkey package was very timely. That update was followed closely by Firefox and Thunderbird updates for RHEL 4. Nearly a week went by before the RHEL 4 Seamonkey package was updated, and Fedora Core 5 was the last to be addressed.

From a business standpoint it makes sense for Red Hat to fix things for their paying customers first. Fedora is the community distribution, and it needs help from the community. Many interesting ideas were discussed in the ensuing thread ranging from having a Red Hat developer ask for help on the fedora-maintainers list when they need it, to better version control systems that would make it easier for community members to submit patches.

Every one did agree that Fedora should be doing better.

Speedy Fedora updates

Posted Aug 17, 2006 17:19 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

I would think that even the paying customers would object to security releases for Firefox being delayed for the s390 version, since it is highly unlikely that there are any customers that run Firefox from an s390 system (those machines are servers, not desktops).

Speedy Fedora updates

Posted Aug 17, 2006 19:28 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The problem was only in building Firefox for Fedora Core and not for RHEL. Fedora Core and RHEL share the same buildsystem.