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

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 04.09.2017 21:50, Chris Coulson wrote:

> 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.
52-esr doesn't require rust (newer versions do).

I've already made some steps w/ tbird (hat to fix a lots of build
problems and removed spyware), but didn't have the time to finish that
yet. The mozilla codebase is such an imense monster, that it's just too
much for one man alone.

In response to the hostile reactions from the moz corp. on my patches
and bug reports (even threatened me w/ full ban from moz.org), I've
started the Librezilla project. But still - even received lots of
moral support - just a one-man show, and I'm lacking the time for that
(unless some wealthy sponsor comes around and pays my bills for about
a year ;-)

There're other moz forks out there, eg. waterfox (not sure whether
icewheasel is still alive). IMHO, we should try bringing them all
together and get in touch w/ other distros.

For start we could base on ESR52 and get all the dist folks working
on one codebase - if it's well done, the dist-specific pieces should
be minimal (maybe for all the .deb based distros actually the same).
We'd sync w/ upstream's esr52, as long as it's active. And if we
create an big enough demand, maybe we could convince upstream to
extend the support lifetime.

Later on, when rust hopefully might be more dist-friendly, we could
think about moving to newer moz/ff versions.


The first, most important point here is: we need to unite as much
resources as possible.


--mtx