On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 09:48 -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Ken Gunderson wrote: > > On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 09:15 +0000, Ghee Teo wrote: > >> Ken Gunderson wrote > >>> But hey, let's take an optimistic stance and assume Oracle doesn't let > >>> OpenSolaris die on the vine - if/when we actually do get another release > >>> I would ask that it be coordinated with Gnome release and NOT ship with > >>> beta version of Firefox - whoever was responsible for that in 2009.06 > >>> ought to keel hauled on Ellison's yacht. > >>> > >> Firefox is not part of GNOME release. Firefox has its own released > >> cycles. GNOME's browser is called epiphany. Though almost all GNOME > >> based distro shipped Firefox as the primary browser for obvious reason. > > > > As I am well aware. That doesn't change my opinion that releases should > > be timed so as to coincide with Gnome releases and NOT ship with beta > > versions of Firefox, or anything else for that matter. > > The intent was to ship with the final release of Firefox 3.1, but as 3.1 > morphed into 3.5 at Mozilla the build schedule slipped, and we were stuck > with a beta. To avoid repeating this, 2010.03 went with 3.5.x instead > of trying to track 3.6 betas, and I'm sure we'll get complaints that 3.6 > is already out but not included.
Thank you for the clarification, Alan. That's welcome news. As for the complaints, I'll take stability over bleeding edge any day. The hobbyists can avail themselves of dev snapshots if they want/need bleeding edge. While Mozilla has successfully made inroads in the MS dominated world it's not the holy grail for *nix. As someone referenced Epiphany, it would be very nice to have it available as an option as well and since it is a part of Gnome coordination and timing might be less problematic than with Mozilla. Others worth looking at would be Chrome and Midori, the latter a very promising lightweight gtk2 based browser under rapid development. > Unfortunately, there is an actual cost to being on older Firefox releases, > since Mozilla stops producing security patches for old releases after new > releases have been out for a while (6-12 months I think), so if we choose > too old a release, we may stop getting security patches during the lifetime > of the OpenSolaris release. If OS was able to maintain at twice per year release cycle I should think this wouldn't be a problem. I realize things have been a bit "unsettling" for Sun employees this past year (all the ones I know personally were RIF'd.) and that that has likely spilled over a bit to OS but mayhaps OS release engineering could take a good look at projects such as Gnome and OpenBSD with an eye towards the development policies they have in place that facilitate such timely release schedules. -- Ken Gunderson <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
