Old Firefox versions discourage real-world testing of Ubuntu development versions

Chris Coulson chris.coulson at canonical.com
Mon Sep 4 19:50:38 UTC 2017



On 04/09/2017 20:18, Simon Quigley wrote:
> Hello Sebastian,
>
> On 09/04/2017 08:20 AM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
>> The desktop team has been suggesting to remove firefox from those
>> architectures because we don't have the resources to work on those build
>> issues and we believe there are little benefit to have firefox available
>> on e.g ppc64el but that request has been rejected by the foundation team
>> who said they would help to resolve the build issue so we are still
>> waiting on that.
>>
>> In summary, there is no point moving the topic to another list. If you
>> want to help either work on a fix for the build issue or try to convince
>> foundations than most of our firefox users are on i386/amd64 and that if
>> we don't have the resources to deal with build issues in timelined
>> fashion (which experience from the previous cycles suggest) then we are
>> better off having firefox uptodate on those architectures only than
>> staying outdated for most of the cycle for the benefit of architectures
>> who don't have actual desktop users.
> So then what happens with stable releases? I would much rather have an
> out-of-date firefox on devel if it means it's working for release for
> most arches. I say this because Lubuntu 16.04 users on PowerPC or
> Lubuntu users on the Raspberry Pi 3* will not have an up-to-date Firefox
> (see: security issues). From the point of view of Lubuntu Release
> Manager, I don't like that option.
>
> I don't personally know enough about Firefox (otherwise we'd have ALSA
> support) to help with this, but I would if I could (maybe I can look
> more as to what's involved). But I think I can speak for the many users
> of Lubuntu on PowerPC (16.04) and the Pi 3 when I say that this really
> should not be an option. Even if it's not me, I really really hope
> someone will step up to help with this.
>
> If anyone wants statistics, I can gather some.
>
> *Ubuntu MATE ships PowerPC 16.04 images and Raspberry Pi 3 images as well.
>
There hasn't been a Firefox update on PowerPC on any release since June
2016 (it's stuck on 47.0), and there isn't going to be any more Firefox
updates on PowerPC because we don't have the rust compiler building there.

Regards,
- Chris

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