Downgrade is the new upgrade

Posted Dec 22, 2011 5:41 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Downgrade is the new upgrade by jrw
Parent article: Ubuntu disabling the Sun Java JDK browser plugin

How much would you have complained if canonical had left the vulnerabilities be an you had to rebuild all the systems you have access to.because you were compromised?

Downgrade is the new upgrade

Posted Dec 22, 2011 5:58 UTC (Thu) by jrw (subscriber, #69959) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not complaining because they put out an update. I'm glad they put out security updates. I'm complaining because their update was a downgrade, and they didn't tell me about it in advance, so I could skip it, and they didn't provide me any way to restore the packages after they had been neutered.

Downgrade is the new upgrade

Posted Dec 22, 2011 6:58 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

I can understand your frustration at not seeing the information on this issue before you did the update, but given that Oracle will not let Cononical distribute the code, how do you expect them to legally let you load it back?

Downgrade is the new upgrade

Posted Dec 22, 2011 7:27 UTC (Thu) by jrw (subscriber, #69959) [Link]

I'm not unhappy with Canonical for no longer hosting these packages. That frustration should be properly directed at Oracle.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are packaging techniques which allow for dynamically loading third-party hosted software when the outer package is installed. That may be the only remaining alternative if there's any interest in keeping these packages alive. In my case, I can download and install them manually, so that would only be a small convenience to me.