flash player 9 -don't include it in Feisty

[Conrad Knauer]

On 1/19/07, Andrew Jorgensen <andrew.jorgensen at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I would like to ask the devels not to include Flash 9 in our
> > repositories... It is too damn buggy, and it's not worth the bad PR
> > Feisty might get with crashing Firefoxes...
>
> Since it's not included in main, or even restricted, it's not going to
> change much to remove it from the repositories.  Users who want to use
> the plugin and who are smart enough to have installed it from the
> repositories will find it just as easy (and as desirable) to download
> it directly from Adobe (it's really not hard).

Having to go to a website to find a file and then manually installing
it is certainly NOT easier than a nice package management system, nor
does it inform you of updates unless they've specifically built that
in.

> I share your frustration generally though.  Buggy software is a real
> pain.  I really do sympathize.  I don't think my own problems are
> related to flash but I've had the current version of firefox crash a
> lot more than previous versions.  Actually the worst thing about that
> for me is the dialog that says that firefox crashed and would I like
> to restore my session.  It's like trowing up a big banner that says
> "Our software is buggy!  Would you like us to work around that rather
> than fix it?"

Are seatbelts in cars just a 'workaround' to safety problems or do
they increase the overall safety of cars?

- AFAIK in practice, bugs in complex software can never be completely
eliminated, just minimized (note that FF2 is up to its second minor
version while 1.5 is up to its tenth)
- software is susceptible to external conditions (e.g. power failure
and fluctuations, PEBKAC error ;) that can cause system instability
- users WANTED this functionality; the SessionSaver extension for FF 1
and 1.5 was very popular: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/436/

Now if you want to argue that it should just restore the session
silently (unless that keeps making it crash), that's another matter...

CK