Interviewed by CNN on 17/07/2014 16:18, hawker told the world: > Why does SM have to stay on such a fast release schedule? What was wrong > with the slower schedule of yesteryear? Just because FF and TB do it > does SM need to as well?
Sorta. The Firefox people are the ones responsible for Gecko, which is the engine that powers Seamonkey as well. Every six weeks a new Gecko version is released with bug fixes, security fixes and small feature increments. The important thing to keep in mind is that the previous version is immediately _dropped_. No support at all. No bug fixes. No security fixes. Well, there is an exception to that: they keep supporting _one_ older version, for roughly _one_ year. That's for the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR). Right now that would be Firefox 24 ESR. This Gecko version receives mostly security and stability fixes, and few if any other sorts of fixes. One might think: "OK, the why don't they use the ESR version of Gecko and update at a more leisurely pace?" That's what the Thunderbird guys are doing, after all. Here's the thing: by doing that, the SM team would have to deal all at once with whatever issues that could have been spread over eight upgrade cycles or so and dealt with piecemeal. Which means a far larger chance for disastrous issues. (This is not as much of a problem for Thunderbird because, well, T-bird only deals with plaintext and HTML e-mail, which evolves far slower than Web HTML. It doesn't even attempt to process Javascript, for instance -- it just ignores it.) Also, let's say for the sake of argument that some new code in Gecko 25 caused problems in SM but the issue went unreported and ignored because SM stuck with Gecko 24 for one year. By the time the issue surfaces (around Gecko 32 or thereabouts), the fix can become much harder, because by then the Firefox team has added four our five more things that can be broken because they depend on how the Gecko-25 code behaves. So now instead of one bug to fix, you have maybe half a dozen. Simply stated, the dev team _has_ to keep up. They have to keep testing the Seamonkey code with each new release, identify issues and either fix them in SM code or report the issue to the Gecko team. Going to the trouble of making sure that SM works with Gecko, say, 31 (to be released next week) and not giving the users the benefits of the security fixes in Gecko 31 would be sorta irresponsible. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from my Franklin Translator. * Added by TagZilla 0.7a1 running on Seamonkey * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list support-seamonkey@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
