Firefox 1.0.x sunset announcement and Breezy

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 18 April 2006 03:06, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> > The solution to this seems rather obvious to me. Dapper will be
> > supported for three years - that doesn't mean it will support
> > Firefox 1.0 for three years.
> >
> > When the Mozilla Foundation deprecates Firefox 1.0, Dapper
> > provides an upgrade to 1.5. So instead of the user getting a
> > security upgraded 1.0, they get 1.5.
> >
> > Or am I missing something obvious in the thread?
>
> For a start, Dapper has never supported firefox 1.0, it has always
> been firefox 1.5. 

OK, thanks for pointing that out (I don't use Dapper)

> Second, you are missing something obvious. All 
> applications which depend on firefox would have to be recompiled if
> firefox were to be upgraded to 1.5. Also all packages which depend
> on any other package compiled from the firefox source code. This is
> a massive endeavour.

Actually it's not such a big deal to recompile like that. These things 
are easily automatable. The lead developer commits a new Firefox to 
the server farm, come back tomorrow and every package has been 
recompiled and could even be on the web servers ready for download. 
Make that all packages on all supported architectures. (Assuming 
Ubuntu uses a server farm system, there's no reason to suppose they 
don't)

The users might have a problem with the size of the new downloads 
though. And their plugins and extension might not work anymore. As I 
see it those would be the primary things to be figured out before 
switching.

-- 
If only you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five