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OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

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Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#151

Post by scythe »

kick wrote: post #147
celticmusic wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questi... ? > It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is…

But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute Why be condescending? The above user has a good point, and your view is clearly against the majority of Arch Linux users.

Obviously this is true for "Arch Linux users", but that is a self-selected set of individuals with correspondingly biased circumstances/behaviors etc... I wonder if your statement still holds holds when we change the domain to people who have used Arch Linux at some point in the past?

As I understand it, Arch Linux is like having a pet. It requires constant care and feeding to keep it alive but can be very rewarding (allegedly)

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#152

Post by djsumdog »

blackhaz wrote: post #14

I am arguing about this on FreeBSD forums - from an end user perspective. I think the benefits of saving disk space by sharing libraries do not justify the inconveniences we, desktop BSD and Linux users, obtain from being forced to disrupt and upgrade hundreds of installed software packages, just because one single desired upgrade requires to pull its dependencies. The whole ecosystem falls down like a card house - o…

Is that what's going on? I wonder how the Gentoo maintainers are dealing. They frequently unbundle libraries, but I've also see a lot of packages with use flags like system-jpeg or system-sdl to force the ebuild to use a system library instead of the built in.

Firefox, Libreoffice and others big applications typically take a long time to compile because they have so much stuff built-in instead of depending on the system libs. They gain a lot of stability and predictability but you can have dependent libs with security issues too.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#153

Post by zrm »

l0b0 wrote: post #140
progval wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> auto-update more than a thousand packages, praying my Python and other projects survive, just because I want a browser update You may want to check out Nix. It's a package manager which isolates each program's dependencies; so you can have multiple versions of the same package. > or a security fix having a centralized repository like this helps in case a it's a library that needs a security fix, because you only ne…

> You may want to check out Nix. Nix is a fantastic concept, and I hope it takes over the world. But the NixOS packages are a mess. I tried it for a few months last year before giving up after several packages and even whole collections of packages became unusable even in the stable repository. The repository needs some serious reworking before Nix can really shine.

It's really trading one problem for a different one. The reason traditional distributions only package one version of a given library and make everything use that same version is so they only have to maintain one version of the library.

If you allow every application to choose its own version then they all choose a different one, which means someone then has to continue to maintain every different version of the library separately. Doing that isn't much if any of a reduction in workload compared with getting every application to use the version the distribution ships, and is much more likely to end up with a situation where dozens of versions of the same library exist and half of them are broken in some way.

The better solution is for libraries to only break compatibility between major versions. Then the packager can ship some suitably recent minor version for each major version of the library, at most two or three major versions are supported at any given time which keeps the maintenance overhead feasible, and every application can successfully link against one of those major versions or another.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#154

Post by djsumdog »

celticmusic wrote: post #126
chmln wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be one of the most inaccurate memes of all time. To counter with anecdata: I've been running Arch Linux testing repositories for over a year now with no issues whatsoever.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questi... ? > It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is…

They first time I tried Arch, I installed it, did a system update and libc completely broke and my system was unusable. I went back to Gentoo.

I went through some hell when I ran Gentoo unstable(~) but for the past several years I've been on Gentoo stable and have very few issues. I've even used it on work laptops at three different companies.

It is definitely more of a do-it-yourself distro than Arch for sure, but I enjoy working with it.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#155

Post by microtonal »

progval wrote: post #105
blackhaz wrote: post #14

I am arguing about this on FreeBSD forums - from an end user perspective. I think the benefits of saving disk space by sharing libraries do not justify the inconveniences we, desktop BSD and Linux users, obtain from being forced to disrupt and upgrade hundreds of installed software packages, just because one single desired upgrade requires to pull its dependencies. The whole ecosystem falls down like a card house - o…

> auto-update more than a thousand packages, praying my Python and other projects survive, just because I want a browser update You may want to check out Nix. It's a package manager which isolates each program's dependencies; so you can have multiple versions of the same package. > or a security fix having a centralized repository like this helps in case a it's a library that needs a security fix, because you only ne…

You may want to check out Nix. It's a package manager which isolates each program's dependencies; so you can have multiple versions of the same package.

In principle true, yes. But it comes with a cost. Even the nixpkgs Firefox maintainers are considering to only ship Firefox ESR starting with NixOS 20.03:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/firefox-on-19-09-could-be-mark...

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/72126

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#156

Post by microtonal »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #95
asveikau wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant small as in code size. In a stable branch you want the size of changes to be small and targeted despite how severe the issue is. You don't want to take on new bugs from patches that aren't related to issues you want to see fixed.

If the change is so small, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to backport the fix? Don't upgrade firefox (and any dependencies), just fix the bug. It would be a lot harder if the actual fix was more complicated and a much more complicated diff. Possible that master has diverged sufficiently from their version that backporting the fix would be unreasonable.

If the change is so small, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to backport the fix? Don't upgrade firefox (and any dependencies), just fix the bug.

As far as I understand, you cannot call it Firefox anymore if you deviate from upstream (which is understandable, because upstream doesn't want to get bug reports for custom changes):

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/distribu...

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#157

Post by chousuke »

jolmg wrote: post #145
celticmusic wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic point. If I sit down in front of my PC and can't do work, it's broken. That I can spend an hour or two fixing it rather than reinstalling is irrelevant.

I see, when you said "break", I thought you meant because of a bug or other error, but now I guess the fact that it needs configuration and learning how to do that configuration is what you're calling broken. Certainly, Arch is definitely not a "it just works" OS. It's a tinkerer's OS. Different distros favor different types of users. By what you said, probably something like Ubuntu or Mint is better, something that…

Arch is not an easy distro to use even if you know what you're doing. Every Arch user essentially creates their own distribution which can break at any point depending on their particular environment. You need to take care of all the little things yourself.

Personally I didn't experience all that much breakage, but eventually got frustrated by kernel updates breaking hotplug kernel module loading until reboot because Arch removes kernel modules for the running kernel. This breaks random things like plugging in a USB drive unless you happened to load the module previously, so you're essentially forced to reboot every time you upgrade the kernel or take care to manually exclude it.

I'm grateful for Arch because their wiki is beyond excellent, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they just want to tinker.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#158

Post by inferiorhuman »

rvz wrote: post #56
blackhaz wrote: post #14

I am arguing about this on FreeBSD forums - from an end user perspective. I think the benefits of saving disk space by sharing libraries do not justify the inconveniences we, desktop BSD and Linux users, obtain from being forced to disrupt and upgrade hundreds of installed software packages, just because one single desired upgrade requires to pull its dependencies. The whole ecosystem falls down like a card house - o…

Well the reality is, some developers of these complex software complain how their software ported to alternative OSes is difficult to maintain even when the BSD devs would offer to maintain it, which is why the BSDs are always on their own here in terms of porting, testing, packaging and updating the software in question. For example, Chromium. Any BSD developer would know that attempting to upstream their port there…

By extension this also renders things like Electron unsupported on the BSDs.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#159

Post by kick »

scythe wrote: post #151
kick wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute Why be condescending? The above user has a good point, and your view is clearly against the majority of Arch Linux users.

Obviously this is true for "Arch Linux users", but that is a self-selected set of individuals with correspondingly biased circumstances/behaviors etc... I wonder if your statement still holds holds when we change the domain to people who have used Arch Linux at some point in the past? As I understand it, Arch Linux is like having a pet. It requires constant care and feeding to keep it alive but can be very rewarding…

You misunderstand it, then. Arch is stable enough that (unless you're doing stupid things, like grabbing half of your system from the AUR) there will only be a breaking change every three years or so. Just set a cron job to update it for you and you have nothing to worry about. It was literally created for lazy system administrators, and it's only gotten better for them as time goes on.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#160

Post by sunaurus »

Avamander wrote: post #116
blackhaz wrote: post #14

I am arguing about this on FreeBSD forums - from an end user perspective. I think the benefits of saving disk space by sharing libraries do not justify the inconveniences we, desktop BSD and Linux users, obtain from being forced to disrupt and upgrade hundreds of installed software packages, just because one single desired upgrade requires to pull its dependencies. The whole ecosystem falls down like a card house - o…

> praying my Python and other projects survive, just because I want a browser update or a security fix. You mean you aren't familiar with Python's virtual environment system exactly intended for isolating development dependencies from system ones but you're blaming the distribution. Please.

None of my virtualenvs (on Linux or on OS X) survived the 3.7 -> 3.8 upgrade. Are you saying they shouldn't have broken?
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