13 ms·

Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

282 points by leo2urlevan 11y ago

Touche 11y ago
> 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 upstream wants.
- mfontani 11y ago
  $deity no, then I'd have to rebuild servers every year instead every two/three :/
  - baldfat 11y ago
    I have been just doing dup on OpenSUSE for over 6 years without a single issue. :) I am getting rusty on rebuilding server skills. Debian's update system does drive me nuts, but I have never run a Debian server for longer then 6 months.
    - mfontani 11y ago
      Considering the last distro upgrade had Apache going from 2.2 to 2.4, which introduced considerable changes to the config file format, "upgrading the servers" is not something that can be done in _all_ cases.
      - baldfat 11y ago
        But that is an issue with Apache and not really a Distro issue. I'm thinking I didn't have to change anything on my Apache config since mine is very vanilla. So if you have a vanilla config on Apache it still works.
- Scarbutt 11y ago
  Surprisingly, Chromium is always up to date on the Debian stable release. Why can't they do the same for Iceweasel/Firefox? keep the ESR version and a version that matches upstream latest releases, but there's probably something I'm missing here.
  - olasd 11y ago
    They do the same for Iceweasel: stable gets updated to the ESR x release around when version x.0.1 gets out.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bsznjyewgd 11y ago
  This is already kind of the case. Debian stable tracks the Firefox ESR releases, updating when a new one comes out. If you want the Firefox frequent releases, you get them with backports from the Debian Mozilla team (out of the main archive). (For the more adventurous desktop users, they can also use Debian unstable for the frequent releases. Unstable isn't unstable in terms of your machine falling over. Rather, there is a lot of package churn, and you need to use something like "sudo aptitude upgrade --visual-preview" when upgrading to ensure that you don't try to upgrade something in the middle of a big package transition before everything is finished and ready in the package repo.)
- scrollaway 11y ago
  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 clockwork. Releases are not any more or less stable than the previous one, but they implement more functionality and a newer release will almost always be better than an older one. Wine's "Stable" releases are meaningless, other than "We spend a month working on bugfixes/regression instead of features before a stable release".
  - dmm 11y ago
    > 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 manually.
    - zanny 11y ago
      Parent is actually wrong - Wine releases with the Gnome cycle, where even releases are stable and odd ones are unstable. Debian should technically be shipping both versions according to upstream release cadences - people who want stable use 1.8 right now, and people who want latest features use 1.9.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        In what way am I wrong? Wine releases are in fact every two weeks with a stable release once in a while. How is it relevant that stable are even and unstable are odd?
        zanny 11y ago
        Because Wine (and Gnome) maintain them in parallel. With Chrome you have the one release version that gets constantly updated every two weeks, but unlike Firefox's ESR / Linux's LTS kernels Google doesn't want to maintain an "LTS" version of Chrome. Yes, its semantics whether you just pin arbitrary releases and call them LTS vs having dedicated versioning schema to support it, but you called it a Chrome like cycle, when its just a more general constant iteration with occasional LTS cycle. Not many products actually use the full blown constant iteration for everyone model Google uses on Chrome.
- detaro 11y ago
  Literally right below that it says: "To address this packaging issue, once a ESR cycle is over, Debian has been accepting uploads of new ESR releases in the stable release." As in, they accept and release new versions from upstream instead of maintaining their own fork with backports.
  - Scarbutt 11y ago
    But most users don't want the ESR version, they want the latest non-ESR version, yes, you can go and get it from mozilla but some users find this inconvenient.
    - detaro 11y ago
      Then they can get it from outside the stable branch. Testing and unstable both have a Iceweasel 44, and there is the mozilla repository at http://mozilla.debian.net/ http://mozilla.debian.net/ just for mozilla software. Debian stable is "conservative and with as few changes as possible", so the ESRs are the obvious choice for it.
- twunde 11y ago
  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 last 5+ years. Simply put, Debian's release model is for a different use-case than your typical web development project
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - mayhew 11y ago
      Ubuntu releases come every 6 months with a LTS every 2 years. The non-LTS releases are of pretty questionable quality and are only supported for 9 months, which makes them pretty awful for server use. Debian releases and Ubuntu LTS releases are about equal. New releases come every ~2 years and with Debian's new LTS policy, both are supported for 5 years in total. So you could say for server usage they have similar release cycles.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Debian has both: I use Stable on my servers and Unstable/Sid (which is a rolling-release distro) on my laptop.
    - shmerl 11y ago
      There is also Debian testing which is more polished than Sid, but is also semi-rolling.
  - Touche 11y ago
    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?
shmerl 11y ago
Related: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935 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.
- astrodust 11y ago
  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?
  - b34r 11y ago
    Gitlab?
  - perlgeek 11y ago
    OTRS and RT allow you to watch a ticket. Thus you can chose to be notified for changes to a ticket (opt-in). I know of no particular opt-out feature, though at least for OTRS it would be rather easy to write an add-on that makes you watch all new tickets in a particular queue, of which you could opt-out by stopping to watch a ticket.
  - jhasse 11y ago
    > 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?
    - miah_ 11y ago
      You can (un)subscribe to specific issues, but you cannot filter issues in general. Which means you'll still get notified about new issues until you manually (or programmatically) unsubscribe from them.
    - 11y ago
scrollaway 11y ago
Doesn't look to be responding. Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PtAvYwWqUBMJ:https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi%3Fbug%3D815006&num=1&hl=en&gl=gr&strip=1&vwsrc=0 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PtAvYw...
moron4hire 11y ago
I don't understand why Debian has anything to do with Firefox. Why does the operating system have any say on what applications get released and how often? Isn't this the whole point of using free, open source software? To be able to choose your own components? Why do we need Debian bundling Firefox?
- daemin 11y ago
  Package Managers. In Debian the package manager (and repositories) is the app store.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    This is, to me, a point against package managers. Little Windows universe secret: Installers aren't that bad.
    - temp 11y ago
      >Installers aren't that bad Nothing stops you from getting Firefox on Debian the "Windows" way.
      - moron4hire 11y ago
        Tried it, couldn't get it to work. This was Raspbian, though.
        mort96 11y ago
        Did you try to download the x86 build? If so, it's your fault. If they don't provide an arm build, or if you got the arm build, it's Mozilla's fault, not Debian's.
        mwcampbell 11y ago
        As far as I can tell, Mozilla doesn't provide official Firefox builds for any ARM Linux device. The official Linux x86_64 build for version 44.0.2 is here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/44.0.2/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-44.0.2.tar.bz2 https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/44.0.2/linux-x8... I don't know who uses those builds, though. We can be sure that the year of Linux on the desktop will never arrive if we expect end-users to unpack tarballs. Edit: To make that last part a little more constructive, perhaps this will help with distro-agnostic packaging of official Linux builds of Firefox and other applications: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps
esaym 11y ago
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 still distribute it with the official logos and name. Which lead to Iceweasel... but then a few years later Mozilla changed the license terms so now I guess here we are....
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  A few years ago some extensions wouldn't work with iceweasel. I forget which ones, and why, but it basically boiled down to: "this extension is meant for firefox". I wish I could remember which ones those were to see if it really was just a naming issue.
- currysausage 11y ago
  > 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 https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#Considerations [2] https://wiki.debian.org/Status/Testing https://wiki.debian.org/Status/Testing [3] https://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing https://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing [4] http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/ http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/
  - chei0aiV 11y ago
    You can slightly speed it up by using apt pinning to get security updates from Debian unstable (but other packages from testing) when available. https://bugs.debian.org/725934 https://bugs.debian.org/725934 To speed it up even more you would need to follow the unstable/testing pages on the security tracker and file bugs to get maintainers to do fixes and do NMUs when maintainers are on vacation or missing. https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/unstable https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/u... https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/testing https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/t...
DHowett 11y ago
It's interesting that the Paul brings up the trademark license clause regarding for-pay distribution. If you are using the Mozilla Mark(s) for the unaltered binaries you are distributing, you may not charge for that product. While it restricts a freedom that Debian is unlikely to exercise, it's still a restriction. Presumably, that makes the trademark license indigestible to the Debian foundation?
- tonyarkles 11y ago
  Ahhhhhh, I've always wondered about clauses like that with the distribution of software compilations. For example, I can buy a Debian boxed set from here: http://www.jbox.ca/product-category/computers-tablets/software/linux-cds-dvds/debian-cds-dvds/ http://www.jbox.ca/product-category/computers-tablets/softwa... or any of the other distributors: https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/ https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/. I think a clause like that would prevent them from selling those.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    I'm fairly sure when you are buying physical copies of Linux distributions you are buying the service of compiling and copying it and providing physical media, the box, any manuals, etc. The source code at a minimum must be made freely available to others. That is, they aren't charging for the code delivered, but the delivery itself and the physical media.
    - geofft 11y ago
      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 means of distribution is that I charge you $30/month for a CD of my distribution (including source to any patches I apply), and I don't distribute it otherwise. I just have to give you the right to rip the CD and put it online for free, if you so choose.
ryandrake 11y ago
> 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 every N days. How people get used to some particular cadence and start believing that it's the only proper (or possible) way! One of the achievements I'm most proud of is helping a group make a difficult transition from a long, irregular cadence to a fast, predictable one. Going from a release process of "Release when company leadership subjectively thinks it's ready" to "Release every 4 weeks on the day" can at first rattle some people who are attached to The Way We've Always Done It, and it requires more discipline in terms of development practices, testing, feature creep, etc. But it can be done! Not saying a faster or slower cycle is needed for Debian or Mozilla (it would depend on a huge number of factors), but your release cadence shouldn't be considered some immovable law of nature.
- fao_ 11y ago
  > but your release cadence shouldn't be considered some immovable law of nature. I agree, but I think it mostly depends on the product. If you have a bulletproof software implementation of, say, a finances managing system, then you will rarely need to update it -- as long as it has no bugs then the users will be happy with it. On the flip side, if you have a program that has to be both secure, but also have a lot of features, and is used by a lot of people, then I think you will find yourself releasing every few days -- even if you just stick to staying on top of any vulnerabilities and bugs that could occur.
  - bmm6o 11y ago
    Even if you are adding features, some software products are such that customers simply can't/won't upgrade at a pace of more than a few times a year (if that). Anything mission critical will need to go through validation, acceptance testing, you'll want to check that integrations with other products are unaffected, etc. Especially if the organization is understaffed in the IT department, then these sorts of upgrades can easily lose priority to the 100 other things on their plates.
oliwarner 11y ago
Congratulations HN, OP, we DDoSed the debian bug tracker. Please be considerate when linking to webapps. If there's a static or cached version available, please post that. In this case Debian's tracker mirrors everything to publicly mirrored mail servers (which are static), ie: https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg1397739.html https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.o...
- mcagl 11y ago
  I had exactly the same thought...
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Or write faster apps? Caching pages for logged-out users is part of web site performance 101.
  - windsurfer 11y ago
    Debbugs works great for being last updated 12 years ago. It's main interface is email, after all, so the web interface is read-only. I think the real issue here is the hardware it's running on.
    - mwcampbell 11y ago
      Forking a new process to run a Perl CGI script for every request is going to be far from optimal on any hardware.
    - secure 11y ago
      With regards to hardware being the issue: The last I’ve heard was that debbugs is run on the fastest hardware the Debian project has available, i.e. one of the few machines with fast SSDs.
  - ebbv 11y ago
    Right so even if your application is only meant for 10 concurrent users it's your duty to optimize it to the point where it can handle HN traffic... Come on man.
txutxu 11y ago
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 not an elastic architecture in the cloud to support/pay-for traffic peaks. Debian may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. Debian isn't perfect. The Debian bugtracker maybe not the web application I could write in 2016, but I'm conscious on how much work has been around it, and it's ecosystem, how much I'm in debt with the Debian bug tracker as opensource user, and how much should I THANK to the people who did work on it, who works on it and who uses it, and even translates it Depressing to sometimes find great threads, and sometimes loose the time with subjective views, inexperienced reviews, false and incomplete assertions, haters, and mass style thinking. I'm scared to imagine on hands of what kind of people there are technological choices... or to think that people gets influenced by content creators of this level... maybe I'm lucky and most of those opinions I dislike, are not from real engineers/hackers, but from lost re-users, and people without humility repeating what they find shocking, like a child of 3 years. Feel free to downvote without reasoning why.
- daeken 11y ago
  > If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one. Are you really saying that the only way to contribute to Debian's success is to directly fix problems yourself? Community feedback (in the form of bug reports, comments on forums, mailing list discussion participation, etc) is hugely important in most every open source project; dismissing that is foolish at best and harmful at worst.
  - txutxu 11y ago
    well, I suppose my point there was: "Talk about the problem, where you can fix it, not just a comment in a third party forum". I was after a telephone discussion and maybe I was a little bit harsh. It's not that bug reports are not useful, it's that if you follow the debian manual, you don't need the web interface for reporting bugs... People working on web technologies, use to blame opensource projects a lot, without any help.
rewqfdsa 11y ago
That's disappointing; the article mentions that Mozilla is happy with Debian's patch set, but I don't think they'd be happy with a patch that disabled mandatory extension signing. I was looking forward to Iceweasel sparing us from that anti-user nonsense.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
digi_owl 11y ago
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.

282 points by leo2urlevan 11y ago

> 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 upstream wants.

mfontani 11y ago
$deity no, then I'd have to rebuild servers every year instead every two/three :/
- baldfat 11y ago
  I have been just doing dup on OpenSUSE for over 6 years without a single issue. :) I am getting rusty on rebuilding server skills. Debian's update system does drive me nuts, but I have never run a Debian server for longer then 6 months.
  - mfontani 11y ago
    Considering the last distro upgrade had Apache going from 2.2 to 2.4, which introduced considerable changes to the config file format, "upgrading the servers" is not something that can be done in _all_ cases.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      But that is an issue with Apache and not really a Distro issue. I'm thinking I didn't have to change anything on my Apache config since mine is very vanilla. So if you have a vanilla config on Apache it still works.
Scarbutt 11y ago
Surprisingly, Chromium is always up to date on the Debian stable release. Why can't they do the same for Iceweasel/Firefox? keep the ESR version and a version that matches upstream latest releases, but there's probably something I'm missing here.
- olasd 11y ago
  They do the same for Iceweasel: stable gets updated to the ESR x release around when version x.0.1 gets out.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bsznjyewgd 11y ago
This is already kind of the case. Debian stable tracks the Firefox ESR releases, updating when a new one comes out. If you want the Firefox frequent releases, you get them with backports from the Debian Mozilla team (out of the main archive). (For the more adventurous desktop users, they can also use Debian unstable for the frequent releases. Unstable isn't unstable in terms of your machine falling over. Rather, there is a lot of package churn, and you need to use something like "sudo aptitude upgrade --visual-preview" when upgrading to ensure that you don't try to upgrade something in the middle of a big package transition before everything is finished and ready in the package repo.)
scrollaway 11y ago
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 clockwork. Releases are not any more or less stable than the previous one, but they implement more functionality and a newer release will almost always be better than an older one. Wine's "Stable" releases are meaningless, other than "We spend a month working on bugfixes/regression instead of features before a stable release".
- dmm 11y ago
  > 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 manually.
  - zanny 11y ago
    Parent is actually wrong - Wine releases with the Gnome cycle, where even releases are stable and odd ones are unstable. Debian should technically be shipping both versions according to upstream release cadences - people who want stable use 1.8 right now, and people who want latest features use 1.9.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      In what way am I wrong? Wine releases are in fact every two weeks with a stable release once in a while. How is it relevant that stable are even and unstable are odd?
      - zanny 11y ago
        Because Wine (and Gnome) maintain them in parallel. With Chrome you have the one release version that gets constantly updated every two weeks, but unlike Firefox's ESR / Linux's LTS kernels Google doesn't want to maintain an "LTS" version of Chrome. Yes, its semantics whether you just pin arbitrary releases and call them LTS vs having dedicated versioning schema to support it, but you called it a Chrome like cycle, when its just a more general constant iteration with occasional LTS cycle. Not many products actually use the full blown constant iteration for everyone model Google uses on Chrome.
detaro 11y ago
Literally right below that it says: "To address this packaging issue, once a ESR cycle is over, Debian has been accepting uploads of new ESR releases in the stable release." As in, they accept and release new versions from upstream instead of maintaining their own fork with backports.
- Scarbutt 11y ago
  But most users don't want the ESR version, they want the latest non-ESR version, yes, you can go and get it from mozilla but some users find this inconvenient.
  - detaro 11y ago
    Then they can get it from outside the stable branch. Testing and unstable both have a Iceweasel 44, and there is the mozilla repository at http://mozilla.debian.net/ http://mozilla.debian.net/ just for mozilla software. Debian stable is "conservative and with as few changes as possible", so the ESRs are the obvious choice for it.
twunde 11y ago
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 last 5+ years. Simply put, Debian's release model is for a different use-case than your typical web development project
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - mayhew 11y ago
    Ubuntu releases come every 6 months with a LTS every 2 years. The non-LTS releases are of pretty questionable quality and are only supported for 9 months, which makes them pretty awful for server use. Debian releases and Ubuntu LTS releases are about equal. New releases come every ~2 years and with Debian's new LTS policy, both are supported for 5 years in total. So you could say for server usage they have similar release cycles.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Debian has both: I use Stable on my servers and Unstable/Sid (which is a rolling-release distro) on my laptop.
  - shmerl 11y ago
    There is also Debian testing which is more polished than Sid, but is also semi-rolling.
- Touche 11y ago
  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?

shmerl 11y ago

Related: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935 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.

astrodust 11y ago
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?
- b34r 11y ago
  Gitlab?
- perlgeek 11y ago
  OTRS and RT allow you to watch a ticket. Thus you can chose to be notified for changes to a ticket (opt-in). I know of no particular opt-out feature, though at least for OTRS it would be rather easy to write an add-on that makes you watch all new tickets in a particular queue, of which you could opt-out by stopping to watch a ticket.
- jhasse 11y ago
  > 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?
  - miah_ 11y ago
    You can (un)subscribe to specific issues, but you cannot filter issues in general. Which means you'll still get notified about new issues until you manually (or programmatically) unsubscribe from them.
  - 11y ago

scrollaway 11y ago

Doesn't look to be responding. Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PtAvYwWqUBMJ:https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi%3Fbug%3D815006&num=1&hl=en&gl=gr&strip=1&vwsrc=0 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PtAvYw...

moron4hire 11y ago

I don't understand why Debian has anything to do with Firefox. Why does the operating system have any say on what applications get released and how often? Isn't this the whole point of using free, open source software? To be able to choose your own components? Why do we need Debian bundling Firefox?

daemin 11y ago
Package Managers. In Debian the package manager (and repositories) is the app store.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  This is, to me, a point against package managers. Little Windows universe secret: Installers aren't that bad.
  - temp 11y ago
    >Installers aren't that bad Nothing stops you from getting Firefox on Debian the "Windows" way.
    - moron4hire 11y ago
      Tried it, couldn't get it to work. This was Raspbian, though.
      - mort96 11y ago
        Did you try to download the x86 build? If so, it's your fault. If they don't provide an arm build, or if you got the arm build, it's Mozilla's fault, not Debian's.
      - mwcampbell 11y ago
        As far as I can tell, Mozilla doesn't provide official Firefox builds for any ARM Linux device. The official Linux x86_64 build for version 44.0.2 is here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/44.0.2/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-44.0.2.tar.bz2 https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/44.0.2/linux-x8... I don't know who uses those builds, though. We can be sure that the year of Linux on the desktop will never arrive if we expect end-users to unpack tarballs. Edit: To make that last part a little more constructive, perhaps this will help with distro-agnostic packaging of official Linux builds of Firefox and other applications: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps

esaym 11y ago

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 still distribute it with the official logos and name. Which lead to Iceweasel... but then a few years later Mozilla changed the license terms so now I guess here we are....

CaptSpify 11y ago
A few years ago some extensions wouldn't work with iceweasel. I forget which ones, and why, but it basically boiled down to: "this extension is meant for firefox". I wish I could remember which ones those were to see if it really was just a naming issue.
currysausage 11y ago
> 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 https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#Considerations [2] https://wiki.debian.org/Status/Testing https://wiki.debian.org/Status/Testing [3] https://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing https://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing [4] http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/ http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/
- chei0aiV 11y ago
  You can slightly speed it up by using apt pinning to get security updates from Debian unstable (but other packages from testing) when available. https://bugs.debian.org/725934 https://bugs.debian.org/725934 To speed it up even more you would need to follow the unstable/testing pages on the security tracker and file bugs to get maintainers to do fixes and do NMUs when maintainers are on vacation or missing. https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/unstable https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/u... https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/testing https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/t...

DHowett 11y ago

It's interesting that the Paul brings up the trademark license clause regarding for-pay distribution. If you are using the Mozilla Mark(s) for the unaltered binaries you are distributing, you may not charge for that product. While it restricts a freedom that Debian is unlikely to exercise, it's still a restriction. Presumably, that makes the trademark license indigestible to the Debian foundation?

tonyarkles 11y ago
Ahhhhhh, I've always wondered about clauses like that with the distribution of software compilations. For example, I can buy a Debian boxed set from here: http://www.jbox.ca/product-category/computers-tablets/software/linux-cds-dvds/debian-cds-dvds/ http://www.jbox.ca/product-category/computers-tablets/softwa... or any of the other distributors: https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/ https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/. I think a clause like that would prevent them from selling those.
- kbenson 11y ago
  I'm fairly sure when you are buying physical copies of Linux distributions you are buying the service of compiling and copying it and providing physical media, the box, any manuals, etc. The source code at a minimum must be made freely available to others. That is, they aren't charging for the code delivered, but the delivery itself and the physical media.
  - geofft 11y ago
    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 means of distribution is that I charge you $30/month for a CD of my distribution (including source to any patches I apply), and I don't distribute it otherwise. I just have to give you the right to rip the CD and put it online for free, if you so choose.

ryandrake 11y ago

> 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 every N days. How people get used to some particular cadence and start believing that it's the only proper (or possible) way! One of the achievements I'm most proud of is helping a group make a difficult transition from a long, irregular cadence to a fast, predictable one. Going from a release process of "Release when company leadership subjectively thinks it's ready" to "Release every 4 weeks on the day" can at first rattle some people who are attached to The Way We've Always Done It, and it requires more discipline in terms of development practices, testing, feature creep, etc. But it can be done! Not saying a faster or slower cycle is needed for Debian or Mozilla (it would depend on a huge number of factors), but your release cadence shouldn't be considered some immovable law of nature.

fao_ 11y ago
> but your release cadence shouldn't be considered some immovable law of nature. I agree, but I think it mostly depends on the product. If you have a bulletproof software implementation of, say, a finances managing system, then you will rarely need to update it -- as long as it has no bugs then the users will be happy with it. On the flip side, if you have a program that has to be both secure, but also have a lot of features, and is used by a lot of people, then I think you will find yourself releasing every few days -- even if you just stick to staying on top of any vulnerabilities and bugs that could occur.
- bmm6o 11y ago
  Even if you are adding features, some software products are such that customers simply can't/won't upgrade at a pace of more than a few times a year (if that). Anything mission critical will need to go through validation, acceptance testing, you'll want to check that integrations with other products are unaffected, etc. Especially if the organization is understaffed in the IT department, then these sorts of upgrades can easily lose priority to the 100 other things on their plates.

oliwarner 11y ago

Congratulations HN, OP, we DDoSed the debian bug tracker. Please be considerate when linking to webapps. If there's a static or cached version available, please post that. In this case Debian's tracker mirrors everything to publicly mirrored mail servers (which are static), ie: https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg1397739.html https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.o...

mcagl 11y ago
I had exactly the same thought...
nitrogen 11y ago
Or write faster apps? Caching pages for logged-out users is part of web site performance 101.
- windsurfer 11y ago
  Debbugs works great for being last updated 12 years ago. It's main interface is email, after all, so the web interface is read-only. I think the real issue here is the hardware it's running on.
  - mwcampbell 11y ago
    Forking a new process to run a Perl CGI script for every request is going to be far from optimal on any hardware.
  - secure 11y ago
    With regards to hardware being the issue: The last I’ve heard was that debbugs is run on the fastest hardware the Debian project has available, i.e. one of the few machines with fast SSDs.
- ebbv 11y ago
  Right so even if your application is only meant for 10 concurrent users it's your duty to optimize it to the point where it can handle HN traffic... Come on man.

txutxu 11y ago

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 not an elastic architecture in the cloud to support/pay-for traffic peaks. Debian may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. Debian isn't perfect. The Debian bugtracker maybe not the web application I could write in 2016, but I'm conscious on how much work has been around it, and it's ecosystem, how much I'm in debt with the Debian bug tracker as opensource user, and how much should I THANK to the people who did work on it, who works on it and who uses it, and even translates it Depressing to sometimes find great threads, and sometimes loose the time with subjective views, inexperienced reviews, false and incomplete assertions, haters, and mass style thinking. I'm scared to imagine on hands of what kind of people there are technological choices... or to think that people gets influenced by content creators of this level... maybe I'm lucky and most of those opinions I dislike, are not from real engineers/hackers, but from lost re-users, and people without humility repeating what they find shocking, like a child of 3 years. Feel free to downvote without reasoning why.

daeken 11y ago
> If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one. Are you really saying that the only way to contribute to Debian's success is to directly fix problems yourself? Community feedback (in the form of bug reports, comments on forums, mailing list discussion participation, etc) is hugely important in most every open source project; dismissing that is foolish at best and harmful at worst.
- txutxu 11y ago
  well, I suppose my point there was: "Talk about the problem, where you can fix it, not just a comment in a third party forum". I was after a telephone discussion and maybe I was a little bit harsh. It's not that bug reports are not useful, it's that if you follow the debian manual, you don't need the web interface for reporting bugs... People working on web technologies, use to blame opensource projects a lot, without any help.

rewqfdsa 11y ago

That's disappointing; the article mentions that Mozilla is happy with Debian's patch set, but I don't think they'd be happy with a patch that disabled mandatory extension signing. I was looking forward to Iceweasel sparing us from that anti-user nonsense.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

digi_owl 11y ago

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.