[Bug 1065586] Re: Downgrade from Firefox 16 to 15.0.1

[Chris Coulson]

I'm well aware of the reason Mozilla pulled 16.0 and turned off updates,
thanks. But it is easy for them to do that without breaking their
updater (note, they didn't downgrade anybody) and without users
noticing.

We don't have a good way of doing that because when 16.0 is uploaded it
replaces the old version in the archive. So, the alternatives are to
either delete the package from the archive or reupload and rebuild the
old version with a higher version number.

The first option means update-manager will still offer an upgrade to
16.0 but will fail with a 404 error when trying to upgrade. It also
means that attempts to install Firefox would also fail with a 404 error.
This is terrible UX, and rather than get the 1 bug we have now we'd have
hundreds of them instead from users who are completely confused.

The second option would avoid the problems of the first option, but as I
said in my last comment, it would have tied all of the builders up for
half a day and wasted engineering resources. In addition to that, users
would be offered a downgrade which is not really supported and risks
creating a whole new set of unforeseen problems.

This is just the way that Debian repositories work, I'm afraid. For
these reasons, the bar is set very high for removing packages from our
archive (ie, the update deletes my data, prevents my machine from
booting)

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Title:
  Downgrade from Firefox 16 to 15.0.1

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