Updating Mozilla plugins in stable (was: Re: Bug#971807: buster-pu: package webext-tbsync)
[overrode Reply-To: to keep the list included]
On Sat, 2020-10-10 at 21:29 +0200, Mechtilde Stehmann wrote:
> I want to clarify one further situation.
>
> Thunderbird 78.3 was uploaded by security team to update from version
> 68.x
>
> Webext-tbsync version 2.11 works fine with thunderbird 68.x. but it
> doesn't work with thunderbird 78.x.
>
> For thunderbird 78.x you need version 2.16 mandatorily.
>
> In the meantime there is thunderbird 78.x in buster (security) and
> webext-tbsync version 2.11 in buster. This combination is
> incompatible (broken).
>
> How can we handle such things in a better way in the future?
This is part of a slightly wider discussion that's come up a few times
before, around the handling of updates to plugins for Mozilla products
(and I guess others, but Firefox and Thunderbird are the ones most
often affected).
Previous security updates to those packages have led both to packages
being updated in stable (often with large diffs) and other packages
being removed as unsupportable.
There's a school of thought which says that it doesn't make sense to
include the plugins in the Debian archive at all, and we should instead
suggest that users install and update plugins from the upstream
repositories directly.
Regards,
Adam
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