Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#121

Post by voltagex_ » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

tomphoolery wrote: post #97

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…

"$PROJECT is not a startup. $PROJECT is not an elastic architecture in the cloud to support/pay-for traffic peaks. $PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. $PROJECT isn't perfect." I have half a mind to just add this to every single project's README in the https://github.com/redis-store organization.

>$PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. $PROJECT isn't perfect.

May I suggest using "$PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources. $PROJECT isn't perfect." - "if you're so good" could be interpreted as "if you're good enough".

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#122

Post by voltagex_ » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:26 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #59

dmm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Release every 2 weeks like clockwork. Which means exciting new regressions every two weeks! When I used wine it was definitely the case that certain applications(games) worked better with specific wine versions so a continuous release cycle could result in breaking a working application. That's something users of stable are trying to avoid. If a user wants the latest version of a package you can always install it m…

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I would like to add that if you become aware of a program that used to work, but no longer does, PLEASE file a bug! We take regressions very seriously[1]. There are often reasons they can't be fixed immediately, but more often we can fix it quickly. But we have to know about it first! [1] We even have an explicit regression tracker that places blame and shame on whoever br…

I'd love to report more stuff in Wine but isn't there a requirement to be running the latest/dev branch? This is tricky to do in Debian (because I prefer to build debs of whatever and then install those).

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#123

Post by txutxu » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:27 PM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #116

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…

The problem with "you can go fix it if you want" is that the barrier to "fixing it" is very high, even with such great things as #debian-mentors. I fully understand the need for all the process and policy but it can be very difficult to get things fixed in Debian without talking to the right people or attending the right conferences.

Agreed, what you can do on first contact, is not always what you would like to do.

I didn't mean it's the only and single way to change something in Debian... the subtle of my message was, that complaining outside the project, does not help to anybody, and forms subjective opinions on persons that didn't have them.

Today, someone at $work that never did write perl, was complaining on perl and Larry Wall just for laughs, I told him: when Mr Google calls you to speak about _your_ language, when the world is full of mirrors of libraries written by all kind of persons and companies for _you_ language, please, come back, and we have some laughs.

It seems that some people needs to "attack third parties together" to feel "in society".

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#124

Post by voltagex_ » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

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.

My contact details are in my profile - I'm happy to help you get this working if you're still interested. It can be hard to find correct instructions for things like manual installs, especially when distros like Raspbian can be slightly different from their upstream sources.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#125

Post by shmerl » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #118

shmerl wrote: post #3

Related: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935 Also, Debian is really lacking some more modern bug management / issue tracking system. It might be useful to provide e-mail interface for it, but I fail to see why it also can't be managed from some site at the same time instead of limiting it to read only view.

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/iceweasel is getting there. The bug tracker has lots of integration with other Debian systems. I'd say it'd be a huge project to upgrade/replace.

Interesting, thanks. I'm using that tracker site quite often to see progress of various packages. But I didn't know it will be useful for managing bugs as well.

By the way, something happened to the fonts on that site a few day ago. They look worse now.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#126

Post by voltagex_ » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #78

subway wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same vendor whether it comes from their site or the package repository. Prove it. The package manager allows you to cryptographically verify the binary was inspected by somebody you trust (the package maintainers). While windows has added code-signing/verification capabilities, many installers are unsigned, and those which are signed don't have a useful trust anchor.

Prove the repository maintainer doesn't blanket approve things because they are overwhelmed.

That's what the mailing list / debbugs are for. Each package has a maintainer(s) who are responsible for looking after the package creation and upload.

A new upload creates an audit trail that could be checked if needed.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#127

Post by voltagex_ » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #125

voltagex_ wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/iceweasel is getting there. The bug tracker has lots of integration with other Debian systems. I'd say it'd be a huge project to upgrade/replace.

Interesting, thanks. I'm using that tracker site quite often to see progress of various packages. But I didn't know it will be useful for managing bugs as well. By the way, something happened to the fonts on that site a few day ago. They look worse now.

I don't think you'll be able to manage bugs from it directly any time soon, but it was an example of a "better" interface for Debian services.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#128

Post by twunde » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:51 PM UTC

Touche wrote: post #43

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…

What does this have to do with Firefox? Is NASA writing rovers as Web apps? If not what does it matter which version of Firefox is installed?

For most companies what version of firefox probably doesn't matter. However, there are tons of legacy desktop apps in government, call centers etc where installing a new version of firefox will break the application. Hell, the callcenter my company uses an app that will only work with certain versions of ie. The company that made the app went out of business years ago and the only thing the call center has is a binary they install on all desktops.

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#129

Post by txutxu » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #121

tomphoolery wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"$PROJECT is not a startup. $PROJECT is not an elastic architecture in the cloud to support/pay-for traffic peaks. $PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. $PROJECT isn't perfect." I have half a mind to just add this to every single project's README in the https://github.com/redis-store organization.

>$PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. $PROJECT isn't perfect. May I suggest using "$PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources. $PROJECT isn't perfect." - "if you're so good" could be interpreted as "if you're good enough".

When I did arrive to the post I was on bad mod by other reasons, the modification that voltagex_ suggests is totally right.

Happy that my keyboard rage was inspiring for something :)

Re: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

#130

Post by digi_owl » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

I keep finding it puzzling that Debian would opt to maintain a fork of Firefox, while at the same time go all in with systemd because it would be too much effort to maintain something else.