Firefox and Linux

(Posted to my blog last night, forgot to crosspost, please follow up  
here!)

At the recent Firefox Summit, a group of people led by Chris Aillon  
(Red Hat), Robert O’Callahan (Novell), and myself met to discuss  
Firefox on the Linux desktop. Historically, there has been a great  
deal of tension between mozilla.org and the Linux distros, notably  
over maintenance of branches, divergence between distros, and lack of  
sustained communication between the groups. All seemed in agreement  
that closer cooperation and dividing responsibilities appropriately  
would benefit everyone involved. A number of changes were proposed  
that have general consensus among the stakeholders.

It is hoped that the proposed changes will drive a stronger and more  
balanced partnership among Mozilla contributors, and enable the Linux  
community to work more closely with the Mozilla community. More  
importantly, we believe this will drive a bigger focus on creating a  
better Linux user experience for everyone.
Development

     * In the Firefox 3 timeline, establish a strong group of  
maintainers to drive and own Linux-specific development. caillon and  
roc will likely act as owners here. This is not an exclusionary  
group, anyone wishing to help in this effort will be able to  
participate and contribute. This certainly includes other projects  
that are based on or share code with Firefox (Flock, Iceweasel, etc).
     * This group will share responsibility for branch policies for  
Linux-specific code. In particular, they may choose to land Linux  
integration features on branches.
     * The vast majority of downstream patches will be pushed  
upstream and into shared CVS, in order to minimize patch sets to  
distro-specific packaging/build requirements, with minor exceptions  
from time to time.

Distribution

     * Most Firefox Linux users are using builds packaged by their  
Linux distribution. We will encourage this by having mozilla.com’s  
download page point to packages from various Linux distributions.
     * The Mozilla Corporation will continue to provide nightly  
builds for testing and development, and will make available reference  
builds for each release in an unsupported form.
     * By minimizing upstream vs. downstream differences, it should  
be much easier for Linux distributions to comply with Mozilla  
trademark requirements. The current situation involves a great deal  
of overhead per distribution due to the large and diverse patch sets.  
Therefore the Mozilla Corporation will be able to work with more  
Linux distributions around branding than we have been able to in the  
past.

Please direct feedback and discussion to the mozilla.dev.planning  
newsgroup, or dev-planning@lists.mozilla.org

caillon has blogged about the changes from the Linux side: http:// 
christopher.aillon.org/blog/dev/mozilla/20061204-linux-alliance.html


Mike Connor
Firefox Lead
mconnor@mozilla.com