Iceweasel/Icedove ESR and Whezzy

[Hideki Yamane]

Hi,

Thank you for maintaining Iceweasel/Icedove.

Now I have a question about its release/update schedule.
As http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/ says, they'll
terminate Firefox 10.0.x ESR and move forward to 17.0.x. And its date
seems to be around Wheezy release. It means Iceweasel/Icedove will be
EOL before/after soon Wheezy release.

Will Iceweasel/Icedove be upgrade to 17.0.x after 10.0.x EOL?

[Mike Hommey]

Post by Hideki Yamane
Hi,
Thank you for maintaining Iceweasel/Icedove.
Now I have a question about its release/update schedule.
As http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/ says, they'll
terminate Firefox 10.0.x ESR and move forward to 17.0.x. And its date
seems to be around Wheezy release. It means Iceweasel/Icedove will be
EOL before/after soon Wheezy release.
Will Iceweasel/Icedove be upgrade to 17.0.x after 10.0.x EOL?

No. It has too many reverse dependencies for this to be possible, even
if it were allowed (Debian doesn't usually bump software versions on a
stable release)

That being said, 17 is going to be released in 6 weeks, so presumably,
one would think it's possible to push it for wheezy. But really, it's
not. First, because of the same reverse dependencies. I doubt many of
them would survive the version bump. Another problem is that it won't
reach a releaseable state in a short time frame. Look at the build logs
of iceweasel 16:
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=iceweasel&suite=experimental
Besides actual code problems on kfreebsd, it crashes on armel, ia64,
powerpc, s390, and sparc. 17 is likely to break in other ways (for
instance, ia64 just broke on 16, it was ok on 15). There are also a lot
of failures in the test suites that need to be addressed (there are also
such failures on 10, but there are less of them)

Mike

[Mike Hommey]

Post by Mike Hommey

Post by Hideki Yamane
Hi,
Thank you for maintaining Iceweasel/Icedove.
Now I have a question about its release/update schedule.
As http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/ says, they'll
terminate Firefox 10.0.x ESR and move forward to 17.0.x. And its date
seems to be around Wheezy release. It means Iceweasel/Icedove will be
EOL before/after soon Wheezy release.
Will Iceweasel/Icedove be upgrade to 17.0.x after 10.0.x EOL?

No. It has too many reverse dependencies for this to be possible, even
if it were allowed (Debian doesn't usually bump software versions on a
stable release)
That being said, 17 is going to be released in 6 weeks, so presumably,
one would think it's possible to push it for wheezy. But really, it's
not. First, because of the same reverse dependencies. I doubt many of
them would survive the version bump. Another problem is that it won't
reach a releaseable state in a short time frame. Look at the build logs
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=iceweasel&suite=experimental
Besides actual code problems on kfreebsd, it crashes on armel, ia64,
powerpc, s390, and sparc. 17 is likely to break in other ways (for
instance, ia64 just broke on 16, it was ok on 15). There are also a lot
of failures in the test suites that need to be addressed (there are also
such failures on 10, but there are less of them)

That being said, I think we should actively advise people to use
backports for iceweasel. Making that statement part of the release notes
might be a good idea. Possibly with a working pinning setup.

Or maybe it would be a good idea to add the working pinning setup to the
iceweasel package itself, so that people that add backports source will
automatically get proper upgrades? Or maybe not, I'm just throwing an
idea.

Mike

[Michael Biebl]

Post by Mike Hommey
That being said, I think we should actively advise people to use
backports for iceweasel. Making that statement part of the release notes
might be a good idea. Possibly with a working pinning setup.
Or maybe it would be a good idea to add the working pinning setup to the
iceweasel package itself, so that people that add backports source will
automatically get proper upgrades? Or maybe not, I'm just throwing an
idea.

Sounds interesting. I'd love to see ESR 17 (or any later ESR version)
easily accessible in wheezy.
Maybe d-i could even generate a proper backports configuration in
sources.list but commented out by default?

Seeing that backports are now an official part of the archive and
promoted more actively, that would make sense imo.

Michael

[Julien Cristau]

Post by Mike Hommey
Or maybe it would be a good idea to add the working pinning setup to the
iceweasel package itself, so that people that add backports source will
automatically get proper upgrades? Or maybe not, I'm just throwing an
idea.

What does that even mean?

Cheers,
Julien

[Mike Hommey]

Post by Julien Cristau

Post by Mike Hommey
Or maybe it would be a good idea to add the working pinning setup to the
iceweasel package itself, so that people that add backports source will
automatically get proper upgrades? Or maybe not, I'm just throwing an
idea.

What does that even mean?

When you have backports in your sources.list, you don't automatically
get your upgrades from there. Once you do install one for the first
time, subsequent upgrades come from backports. But in the case of
iceweasel, version bumps also require new packages for xulrunner and
libmozjs, and that prevents automatic upgrades: iceweasel's is kept
back by apt. Default apt preferences for the iceweasel packages would
ensure stable users that use backports sources will always get the
latest.

Mike

[David Prévot]

[ Maybe a -backports list would be a better place to discuss this issue
than -release ]

Hi,

Post by Mike Hommey
When you have backports in your sources.list, you don't automatically
get your upgrades from there. Once you do install one for the first
time, subsequent upgrades come from backports. But in the case of
iceweasel, version bumps also require new packages for xulrunner and
libmozjs, and that prevents automatic upgrades: iceweasel's is kept
back by apt. Default apt preferences for the iceweasel packages would
ensure stable users that use backports sources will always get the
latest.

You may wish to include an /etc/apt/preferences.d/iceweasel [1] file in
your backported software, but I wonder if that would be a really good
idea, if that would be enough to achieve your purpose, and if that would
be safe of unwanted side effects.

1: $ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/iceweasel
Package: iceweasel
Pin: release a=squeeze-backports
Pin-Priority: 500

Regards

David

[Alexander Wirt]

Post by David Prévot
[ Maybe a -backports list would be a better place to discuss this issue
than -release ]
Hi,

Post by Mike Hommey
When you have backports in your sources.list, you don't automatically
get your upgrades from there. Once you do install one for the first
time, subsequent upgrades come from backports. But in the case of
iceweasel, version bumps also require new packages for xulrunner and
libmozjs, and that prevents automatic upgrades: iceweasel's is kept
back by apt. Default apt preferences for the iceweasel packages would
ensure stable users that use backports sources will always get the
latest.

You may wish to include an /etc/apt/preferences.d/iceweasel [1] file in
your backported software, but I wonder if that would be a really good
idea, if that would be enough to achieve your purpose, and if that would
be safe of unwanted side effects.

Wrong, not in the backported one. In the stable one. If a package is
installed from bpo the file isn't needed.

Alex

[Hideki Yamane]

Hi,

On Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:56:02 +0200

Post by Alexander Wirt

Post by David Prévot

Post by Mike Hommey
When you have backports in your sources.list, you don't automatically
get your upgrades from there. Once you do install one for the first
time, subsequent upgrades come from backports. But in the case of
iceweasel, version bumps also require new packages for xulrunner and
libmozjs, and that prevents automatic upgrades: iceweasel's is kept
back by apt. Default apt preferences for the iceweasel packages would
ensure stable users that use backports sources will always get the
latest.

You may wish to include an /etc/apt/preferences.d/iceweasel [1] file in
your backported software, but I wonder if that would be a really good
idea, if that would be enough to achieve your purpose, and if that would
be safe of unwanted side effects.

Wrong, not in the backported one. In the stable one. If a package is
installed from bpo the file isn't needed.

Do we have any conclusion for this issue?

- Mozilla upstream will terminate 10.0.x ESR update in 19th Febrary,
then will switch to 17.0.x.
- Wheezy seems to be released after above.
- It means that iceweasel/icedove maintainers should work hard if we'll
maintain 10.0.x in Wheezy.
- If we just would encourage users to migrate 17.0.x in backports via
release note, it's easy but it will be significant trouble for average
users, IMHO.
- Just bump Iceweasel/Icedove up is difficult due to reverse dependency.

Q: can we provide updated Iceweasel/Icedove in stable-updates channel?