official debian packages
Categories
(Firefox :: Untriaged, enhancement)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: harald.dunkel, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36
Steps to reproduce:
Would it be possible to provide Debian packages of the official Firefox and Thunderbird, similar to other big opensource packages (chrome, atom, visual studio code, zoom, rocketchat, adoptopenjdk, ...)? Manually installing tar files is surely not state of the art anymore. And the packages provided by Debian are often not up-to-date (which is a security issue) and surely not "official". Not to mention that you support the native installation methods on Windows and MacOS.
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Comment 1•4 years ago
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Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.
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Updated•4 years ago
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Comment 2•4 years ago
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Manually installing tar files is surely not state of the art anymore.
Nobody forces you to do that - you are very free to use a distribution which provides up-to-date pre-compiled packages for you.
I hope Mozilla will not provide "official debian packages", as there are thousands of Linux distributions to cover. Just because $distribution folks aren't "fast enough" doesn't mean that Mozilla folks should do that work. I could imagine Flatpak / Snaps as a compromise though.
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Comment 3•4 years ago
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I believe we do publish official flatpaks and snaps. https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox is the official flatpak, I don't know offhand where the official snap lives.
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Comment 4•4 years ago
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The Snap is built by us, but it has some canonical branding, but it is "official"
My understanding though is that debian does build their own Firefox and have current builds, so I'm not sure why you're seeing otherwise.
Pinging glandium
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Comment 5•4 years ago
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My understanding is that Debian's Firefox packages are kept up to date with security patches, but they only have them for the ESR channel, not the regular release channel.
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Comment 6•4 years ago
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There are Debian packages for Firefox releases in Debian unstable. Debian stable cannot afford to update to new releases of Firefox every 4~6 weeks, so it sticks to ESR, which is supported for security. DSAs are issued every time. Last one: https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4793. Back when Debian had Firefox as the rebranded Iceweasel, there was no yearly version bump for ESR, and instead all security patches were backported. The browser in Debian may not look all shiny, but it is and has always been supported for security.
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Comment 7•4 years ago
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I'm going to boldly decline this.
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Comment 8•4 years ago
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I was manually converting the official tar files for Firefox ESR into deb files for Stretch and Buster again and again, to make them fit into our infrastructure. I won't do that anymore. My recommendation to my colleagues (complaining about the nagging "new version available" popups) is to use Google Chrome instead. Thats about 120 Firefox installations less you have to worry about.
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Comment 9•4 years ago
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Harald: You may want to talk to Debian packaging folks if you created custom Debian packages for Debian distros because Debian packages provided by Debian folks somehow didn't fulfil your needs.
(I don't see much upstream Firefox relation here, apart from "new version available": What you describe basically applies to any package out there.)
Description
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