Re: [Bug 68158] Re: Firefox 2.0

[John Dong]

As a part of the Ubuntuforums.org staff, I fully understand the user demand for Firefox 2 in Ubuntu repositories, but as I've said before, it's not technically feasible. Remind users that for Linux, Firefox is much more than just a browser... it is also an HTML rendering engine used by other programs. If Firefox is upgraded to a new version, everything depending on Firefox to render must also be rebuilt. With any version-bump rebuild, there is a possibility that it will no longer compile with the new firefox. A quick look at "apt-cache rdepends firefox" shows 189 packages that need to be looked at. This does not count all of the packages that depend on libnspr/libnss3, such as gaim-encryption, etc.

Firefox 1.5 inside Breezy Backports was a big mistake on my part. At the time I did not fully understand the ramifications of backporting Firefox, so I went ahead and did it. It was a nightmare chasing after the reverse dependencies and for about a month, reports of Gecko-dependent packages crashing came rolling in. To make matters worse, when 1.5.0.x security updates started coming in, they could not make it to Backports in a timely manner because they either refuse to build or were not packaged in Dapper in a timely manner.

Overall, I'm not going to make a Firefox backport until Gecko-needing apps start using the XulRunner interface so Firefox can be freed of its system duties and once again be just a web browser.

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