Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:03:41 +0100 From: Chris Coulson <chrisccoul...@ubuntu.com> Subject: Re: Ubuntu and future Firefox update schedule
On Thu, 2011-04-14 at 20:27 +1000, Chris Jones wrote: > There?s a bit of discussion going on at the moment regarding the > tightening of scheduled releases of Firefox and their inclusion in > Fedora. > > > > I was curious as to how the Ubuntu Developers felt about it and > whether they feel they will be able to keep up with an increased > Firefox release schedule for inclusion into Ubuntu? > Hi, Which list is the Fedora discussion on? I'd be interested to see this. Anyway, we are in a good position to handle this change already, and our situation is quite different to that of Fedora: 1) We don't build Firefox on xulrunner anymore. This means we can deploy a Firefox update without breaking other things in the archive using xulrunner. It also means that our builds are more aligned with the official mozilla.org builds and we benefit much more from their QA processes. Yes, I know that almost everyone thinks that bundling libs is evil, but this is the best way of deploying updates rapidly without being disruptive at the same time. 2) We already allow new major versions of Firefox in to a stable release as a security update (we did this with Firefox 3.6 last year when support for 3.0 ended). AFAIK, other distro's don't do this (I could be wrong though). In addition to this: - We've dropped almost all Firefox extensions from the archive now. We still permit a few in the archive, but the criteria for inclusion is fairly tight. Dropping extensions has made me slightly unpopular, but they are a terrible maintenance burden when we are going to have to update them in 4 supported Ubuntu releases every 6 weeks or so. - I'm going to be doing some work next cycle to streamline the way we distribute translations for Firefox. Currently, we need to do a full language pack respin when the major version of Firefox is bumped, and this would become the responsibility of the security team to test and deploy if we have to do it to support a security update. This situation isn't sustainable in the long term though, so we will fix that. Also, we need to put things in to perspective a little bit here, as the situation isn't significantly different to what we have now. As things stand today, Firefox gets a security/stability update every 4-6 weeks, with the occasional chemspill release inbetween. Recently, these updates have occasionally included feature additions (eg, 3.6.4 introduced out-of-process plugins as a regular update), but we don't get string changes in these updates. With the new release process, Firefox will get an update up to every 6 weeks which will bump the major version number, with the occasional chemspill release inbetween. These updates will be a combination of security/stability fixes, feature additions/changes and new strings. However, the changes will be incremental rather than major (eg, comparable to the 3.6.3 -> 3.6.4 update, rather than the 3.6 -> 4.0 update). Regards Chris (Firefox maintainer in Ubuntu) *************************************** Thanks for the information Chris. That helps me understand Ubuntu's future plans and path for Firefox implementation of updates. Search Google for the Fedora mailing list entries regarding this issue, it should be able to locate them. There is not a lot of them, but a couple of worried souls. Regards Chris Jones -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
