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Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

bugs.debian.org

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Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#81

Post by mwcampbell »

moron4hire wrote: post #46
temp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Installers aren't that bad Nothing stops you from getting Firefox on Debian the "Windows" way.

Tried it, couldn't get it to work. This was Raspbian, though.

As far as I can tell, Mozilla doesn't provide official Firefox builds for any ARM Linux device.

The official Linux x86_64 build for version 44.0.2 is here:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/44.0.2/linux-x8...

I don't know who uses those builds, though. We can be sure that the year of Linux on the desktop will never arrive if we expect end-users to unpack tarballs.

Edit: To make that last part a little more constructive, perhaps this will help with distro-agnostic packaging of official Linux builds of Firefox and other applications: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#82

Post by michaelmrose »

DHowett wrote: post #25

It's interesting that the Paul brings up the trademark license clause regarding for-pay distribution. If you are using the Mozilla Mark(s) for the unaltered binaries you are distributing, you may not charge for that product. While it restricts a freedom that Debian is unlikely to exercise, it's still a restriction. Presumably, that makes the trademark license indigestible to the Debian foundation?

When included in a larger work it would seem that you can argue you are charging for everything else and providing Firefox for free kind of like Microsoft and IE.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#83

Post by shmerl »

icebraining wrote: post #38
twunde wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't like the 2 year release cycle, use Ubuntu, which is Debian-based. Debian maintains such long release cycles because the tolerance for bugs and incompatibilities are smaller than other linux distros. For long-lived applications or applications that have long planning periods Debian is ideal. NASA uses Debian, because their projects are measured in years, have low tolerances for bugs, and are developed to…

Debian has both: I use Stable on my servers and Unstable/Sid (which is a rolling-release distro) on my laptop.

There is also Debian testing which is more polished than Sid, but is also semi-rolling.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#84

Post by debacle »

jimmaswell wrote: post #52
Peaker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After using apt-get for everything, going back to manually finding an (untrusted) executable, running it, hitting a bunch of next buttons -- seems insane. It is quite bad. External dependencies are also nearly impractical this way, so all installers tend to embed their universe of dependencies, making for an even worse experience.

After simply using installers in Windows, dealing with conflicting package and library dependencies seems insane. I've been unable to use multiple applications on linux because of this issue whereas that would never happen on Windows where installers just have what they need without getting in each other's business.

> installers just have what they need

Have you ever tried writing a Windows installer?

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#85

Post by mordocai »

scrollaway wrote: post #66
icebraining wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a misunderstanding of the goals of Debian Stable. The purpose is not to get a stable release of each upstream project and build a release from those. The goal is to get any release of each upstream project, test it for a few months to ensure there are no show-stopping bugs and to document the known ones, and then freeze it. The goal is not to ensure lack of bugs, it's to ensure stability , that is, th…

The problem then is when this trickles down to projects like Ubuntu. For years, Ubuntu (the desktop distro) had Wine 1.0 as its only version of Wine, when there were something like 40 new development releases of it already available. This caused hundreds upon hundreds of bug reports and user frustrations for no good reason - issues were already fixed in most recent versions of Wine. I used to do triaging for Wine and…

Ubuntu isn't based on debian stable so I'm confused as to why you debian's stable release cycle would have anything to do with ubuntu.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#86

Post by bmm6o »

fao_ wrote: post #29
ryandrake wrote: post #27

> Mozilla releases new Firefox releases every 6 to 8 weeks. In parallel of these rapid releases [...] One of the fun differences between the various organizations I've worked for is the differing ideas of how frequently releases should happen and what is considered "fast" and "slow" in different places. I've seen release cycles measured in weeks and those measured in years. I'm sure there are places that release ever…

> but your release cadence shouldn't be considered some immovable law of nature. I agree, but I think it mostly depends on the product. If you have a bulletproof software implementation of, say, a finances managing system, then you will rarely need to update it -- as long as it has no bugs then the users will be happy with it. On the flip side, if you have a program that has to be both secure, but also have a lot of…

Even if you are adding features, some software products are such that customers simply can't/won't upgrade at a pace of more than a few times a year (if that). Anything mission critical will need to go through validation, acceptance testing, you'll want to check that integrations with other products are unaffected, etc. Especially if the organization is understaffed in the IT department, then these sorts of upgrades can easily lose priority to the 100 other things on their plates.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#87

Post by moron4hire »

debacle wrote: post #84
jimmaswell wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After simply using installers in Windows, dealing with conflicting package and library dependencies seems insane. I've been unable to use multiple applications on linux because of this issue whereas that would never happen on Windows where installers just have what they need without getting in each other's business.

> installers just have what they need Have you ever tried writing a Windows installer?

Yes, several. Have you?

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#88

Post by txutxu »

People,

This is great news for few of us.

But it has been hard to read trough this comments and realize how much ignorance about what Debian is, how it works, what the Debian bug tracker is, what a voluntary-based project is, and to read some assertions and prepotency around in HN

If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one.

Debian is not a startup. Debian is not an elastic architecture in the cloud to support/pay-for traffic peaks. Debian may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. Debian isn't perfect.

The Debian bugtracker maybe not the web application I could write in 2016, but I'm conscious on how much work has been around it, and it's ecosystem, how much I'm in debt with the Debian bug tracker as opensource user, and how much should I THANK to the people who did work on it, who works on it and who uses it, and even translates it

Depressing to sometimes find great threads, and sometimes loose the time with subjective views, inexperienced reviews, false and incomplete assertions, haters, and mass style thinking.

I'm scared to imagine on hands of what kind of people there are technological choices... or to think that people gets influenced by content creators of this level... maybe I'm lucky and most of those opinions I dislike, are not from real engineers/hackers, but from lost re-users, and people without humility repeating what they find shocking, like a child of 3 years.

Feel free to downvote without reasoning why.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#89

Post by kbenson »

geofft wrote: post #70
kbenson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure when you are buying physical copies of Linux distributions you are buying the service of compiling and copying it and providing physical media, the box, any manuals, etc. The source code at a minimum must be made freely available to others. That is, they aren't charging for the code delivered, but the delivery itself and the physical media.

You're permitted (under both the GPL and the DFSG) to restrict who you make the code available to, and to charge them for it. The only requirement is that the recipient have the right to further redistribute the sources, without being compelled to restrict who they distribute it to, or being compelled to charge for it. That is, it is entirely legitimate and legal for me to make a Debian derivative where the only mean…

I'm not sure if this is meant to imply they don't have to offer the source in some form or just a clarification of my prior comment, but I think it's pretty clear from GPL 3.0 section 6[1] that it is required, and the most recompense you can get from this is "for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source", as if it's network accessible it must be free. So, at least part of my prior comment was incorrect, you do not need to provide it free of charge, but the only charge you can require, and then only for providing it on a durable physical medium, is the reasonable cost of doing so.

1: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#90

Post by rewqfdsa »

That's disappointing; the article mentions that Mozilla is happy with Debian's patch set, but I don't think they'd be happy with a patch that disabled mandatory extension signing. I was looking forward to Iceweasel sparing us from that anti-user nonsense.
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