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Re: Firefox non-ESR update needed



On 2020-07-07 09:57, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Tue, Jul 07, 2020 at 09:45:56AM -0400, Gary Dale wrote:
I did install it and it is a single package. It runs fine in parallel with
the esr release. Hopefully the maintainers will continue the practice of
having firefox and firefox_esr available and bring it to Testing.
You don't understand what testing *IS*!

Testing is not a "rolling release".

Testing is not a thing you use because it makes you cooler.

Testing is not a thing you use because it has higher version numbers of
packages, and the sum of all the package version numbers is your score,
and having a higher score makes you win the game.

Testing is not a thing you use because you're an immature child who thinks
any package more than a year old is, like, TOO OLD TO BE USED BY ANYONE,
like ohmygod.

Testing is the NEXT STABLE RELEASE.

Testing is what will become Debian 11, bullseye, in a year or two.

When bullseye is stable, it will not have an unstable firefox package.

When bullseye is stable, it will have firefox-esr, which is a stable
package (or as close as you can get with a browser), because it is a
stable release.

Therefore, testing has firefox-esr.

You run testing because you want to help TEST THE NEXT STABLE RELEASE,
so that you can find bugs in it and report them, and get them fixed
before the release.

Because they sure as hell will not be fixed AFTER the release.  This is
your one and only chance.

If you are the kind of person who MUST HAVE THE LATEST THING, then
Debian is not meant for you.

This includes browsers.

The package maintainers are who make packages stable, not the product developers.

There is nothing to prevent a none-esr version of Firefox from making it into stable. The maintainers just need to install the bug fix patches created to fix the bugs in that particular version. This is exactly what they do when significant bugs are found in the stable version of any package (in fact, a significant security bug was patched in Stretch/Stable a couple of years back that broke things. I had to hold the package back until Buster became the new Stable).

I agree that Mozilla's decision to abandon reasonable numbering is a problem. But the esr release is a year old at this point and will be even older by the time Bullseye becomes stable.

The other issue is what's the point of a non-esr package in SID if it's not going to make it down to Testing then Stable? Version 78 is the next esr release anyway, so why put the non-esr edition in SID?

Anyway, I run the esr version normally, but having a significantly newer version available for those who want it doesn't seem like a bad thing. I remember not too long ago when Stable had two versions of Scribus...


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