Will icecat and or iceweasel and or iceape and or icedove be packaged for Ubuntu Linux

[Tom H]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 12:37 AM Bret Busby <bret at busby.net> wrote:
> On 29/3/21 4:54 am, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users wrote:
>> On Mon, 29 Mar 2021 03:40:11 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
>>>
>>> GNU icecat is apparently only available in tarball form (which
>>> caused snowballing problems with Netscape and its products)
>>
>> every now and then I install IceCat on Arch Linux and Ubuntu. On
>> both the latest version I installed is GNU IceCat 60.7.0. The
>> latest snapshot from git seems to be 78.8.0 [1]. I don't know what
>> those "snowballing problems with Netscape and its products" are
>
> The snowballing problem with Netscape tarballs, that I encountered,
> was that, every time that a new version became available, rather
> than being able to update it, I had to create a new subdirectory
> for the new version tarball, put it in that, then decompress it,
> and I ended up with seven or more directory levels for Netscape.
> It just kept snowballing.

There shouldn't be any snowballing. With icecat _not_ runnning, you
should delete the old icecat directory and replace it with the new
one.

But as Ralf has pointed out, the latest compiled tarball is at v60 and
there's no indication as to whether security bugs have been backported
to it. If you want v78 (which is equivalent to the current firefox-esr
version), you have to download the source via git and compile icecat.