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Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

bugs.debian.org

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Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#101

Post by [deleted] »

moron4hire wrote: post #45
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.

Untrusted by whom? It's the same vendor whether it comes from their site or the package repository. And maybe people include way too many dependencies in their projects if it's too much to manage manually. Also, installers are perfectly capable of managing dependencies.

[deleted]

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#102

Post by geofft »

kbenson wrote: post #89
geofft wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

Well, you can charge for the software as a whole, which I read your comment to claim you can't. I can absolutely say, hey, here's AwesomeDebianFork 1.0 with some custom patches on GPL code, you can get a CD set of binaries + source for $99. I don't have to resort to circumlocutions about service, and I don't have to make the source available to anyone else. (You are free to copy that source CD, though.)

The only thing I can't do is to say, the CD for AwesomeDebianFork 1.0 binaries is $9 and the CD for AwesomeDebianFork 1.0 sources is $90. (The GPL would reject this as not being "reasonable"; the DFSG would reject this outright for violating #2, "The program must include source code".)

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#103

Post by astrodust »

jhasse wrote: post #56
astrodust wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although GitHub Issues has a lot of issues, for the singular reason that you can opt-in and opt-out of notifications on particular subjects I find it vastly more useful than most bug trackers. Is there a good open-source GitHub alternative that implements this feature?

> you can opt-in and opt-out of notifications on particular subjects What do you mean by that? Doesn't every bug tracker implement that feature?

The ones I've used in the past relentlessly spam you about every little thing for every issue or tell you nothing about anything. There's very little in the way of fine-grained control.

I understand some people prefer email for following up on these things, but destroying my inbox by following a busy project is not something I'll ever do. GitHub's default is to notify project owners, issues you've participated in or actively followed, or those you're mentioned in. I think that's fair.

You can also "one click unsubscribe" to them at any time, which is great.

Others I've been subjected to are things that are barely more than mailing lists. I have no idea how people deal with these.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#104

Post by mwcampbell »

protomyth wrote: post #100
txutxu wrote: post #88

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…

> If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one. Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution? > Feel free to downvote without reasoning why. I didn't bother, but "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution?

For all practical purposes, I'd say yes. GNU/Linux as a PC operating system for non-programmers is a lost cause. Sure, some organizations make it work, but it probably requires a lot of technical support; they'd probably be better off using Android tablets and/or Chromebooks if they need something less expensive than a Windows PC, let alone a Mac. And when non-programmers need web hosting, they don't reach for a DigitalOcean droplet; they use a shared host that offers an abstraction over the LAMP stack like cPanel, or an even more non-developer-friendly service like Squarespace.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#105

Post by jdmichal »

mordocai wrote: post #85
scrollaway wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure scrollaway was describing the stable release philosophy as trickling down to Ubuntu, not the actual packages.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#106

Post by vacri »

legulere wrote: post #71
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…

I find it very interesting that they are adopting a different release schedule for Firefox than the rest of Debian stable. People that care about fast release cycles probably really just care about few minor things being up to date, while administrators don't care about which programs/libraries make problems when updating as long as the total amount of breakages in a certain time isn't too high.

This is probably due to the specific nature of browser upgrades, which is the reason why firefox and chrome went to 6-week autoupgrade schedules for clients: people expect a hell of a lot from their browsers; troubleshooting a fractured version environment in such a complex field is next to impossible; important security updates need to be pushed.

So you end up with two main releases for the browser, one is the standard one that updates every six weeks, and the other has a more stable 'extended support' environment that just gets bugfixes, for places that can't easily deal with changes very often (like a business or education SOE). Debian stable usually lasts for about two years, and modern browser releases would find that impossible to support.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#107

Post by cbd1984 »

protomyth wrote: post #100
txutxu wrote: post #88

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…

> If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one. Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution? > Feel free to downvote without reasoning why. I didn't bother, but "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution?

This might not be a bad characterization of where it sits now.

If you want a hand-holding "user-friendly" (and I use the term advisedly, based on the common, flawed conception of what a "user" is), create one based on Debian, leveraging the Debian tools and packages and processes to make an Ubuntu or Mint or something else.

Debian isn't a meta-distribution. It is a distribution in its own right. However, it is commonly used as the foundation for a different distribution, with different goals and different ways of relating to the world. Debian itself remains unchanged, ready to base another distribution off of, and another, and another...

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#108

Post by currysausage »

esaym wrote: post #21

Funny, I've been running Debian since 2007. I mainly got hooked on their 'testing' branch since it is just "always up to date". But I always get people looking over my shoulder and asking "what the heck is 'iceweasel'. To which I explain the whole issue of Debian was distributing a patched version of Firefox with their OS back in ~2007 era and Mozilla, for trademark reasons, said you can't modify the browser and stil…

> I mainly got hooked on their 'testing' branch since it is just "always up to date".

Note that testing doesn't get the same level of security support as stable: "Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern." [1]; more details: [2], [3], [4].

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#Considerations

[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Status/Testing

[3] https://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing

[4] http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#109

Post by jhasse »

astrodust wrote: post #103
jhasse wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can opt-in and opt-out of notifications on particular subjects What do you mean by that? Doesn't every bug tracker implement that feature?

The ones I've used in the past relentlessly spam you about every little thing for every issue or tell you nothing about anything. There's very little in the way of fine-grained control. I understand some people prefer email for following up on these things, but destroying my inbox by following a busy project is not something I'll ever do. GitHub's default is to notify project owners, issues you've participated in or…

I see. I have used trac and bugzilla and both work similar to GitHub (you only subscribe to issues you participate in)

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#110

Post by vacri »

scrollaway wrote: post #9
Touche wrote: post #2

> On the contrary, Debian having a longer release cycle (about every two years), release cycles don't align. Then change your release cycle. Seriously, it's not that hard. Say that browsers are different and get released frequently. Create a firefox-lts package that is updated at the beginning of your Debian release cycle -- and never again. Let the firefox package be the firefox package, updated as frequently as ups…

Debian implements the comical definition of Bureaucracy really well. Missing the forest for the trees and thinking that every single piece of software is built and released the same way. For a Linux distro that has been around so long, it's mind boggling they still don't understand that. Wine used to have the same problem - Wine's cycle had the Chrome-like cycle before Chrome even existed. Release every 2 weeks like…

> For a Linux distro that has been around so long, it's mind boggling they still don't understand that.*

They definitely do understand that - they also offer more packages than any other x86 operating system. It's just that they have a reason for doing it their way. The operating system is meant to provide a stable base, and the user can then select particular software for more frequent upgrades by adding their own target repositories. Or using make.

Debian is one of the two major linux distros that other distros source from. It's a bit weird to suggest that they don't really get how software is developed.

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