For the record, I couldn't have said this better myself.
(I probably have attempted to many times in the past though)
Thank you MCBastos.
~Justin Wood (Callek)
SeaMonkey Council Member
SeaMonkey Release Engineer
On 7/18/2014 1:39 AM, MCBastos wrote:
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.
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