297661 - Firefox name usage for testing builds

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Marketing :: Trademark Permissions, task)

Description

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Fedora Core Rawhide is the unstable version of Fedora Core.  It contains
"unstable" packages in development, such as pre-release versions of GNOME
software (GNOME 2.11 currently whereas the stable version will be branded GNOME
2.12), the beta of OpenOffice.org 2, etc.

We ship Firefox currently at stable version 1.0.4 in Rawhide.  There have been
many changes to the Firefox code since the 1.0 branch was cut.  Naturally, it
makes sense for both the Mozilla Foundation and the Fedora Foundation to want
more testing on the preview release of Firefox 1.1, aka Deer Park Alpha1.

Since Rawhide already ships a beta version (1.7.1) of the next incarnation of
Epiphany (1.8), I'd like to package up a preview release of the next incarnation
of Firefox.  For me, this means that I'd like to keep the Firefox branding
intact, since it is the same project, the upgrade path will be much saner with
RPM, and the package system makes it painful to switch between names.  My
intentions are to note that this is not a final release, and our users already
expect development software as opposed to stable software in Rawhide.

The RPM package will be versioned as:  

firefox-1.1-0.deerpark.alpha1.<releaseid>


Final RPM versions of firefox 1.1 will be versioned as:

firefox-1.1-<releaseid>

The preview release (firefox-deerpark) RPMs *will not be released in any
officially supported Fedora Core version, simply the development tree leading up
to a new release*.  While there is no official schedule for Fedora Core 5
available currently, it is not expected until November at the earliest.  As
Firefox 1.1 is currently targetted for release in Aug/Sep, this should provide
no issue as to ensuring we ship the final version of 1.1 in FC5.

Additionally, should there be some major slip in the Firefox 1.1 release
schedule which causes it to not be ready by the time we need to ship FC5, I will
revert to Firefox 1.0.x for the release.

Comment 1

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Also, it occurs to me that at some point, I might wish to ship firefox
nightlies.  I'd like to also do that for Fedora Core *Rawhide* under the same
banner.  Only do so for testing purposes, never to be released in an actual product.

Comment 2

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

To clarify, I care mostly about continuing to call the package 'firefox' -- the
actual branding you see when you install this package is not that important to
me in a development context.

Comment 3

[Chris Beard]

So long as the actual branding in the RPM package is consistent with what we're
shipping in our Alpha and Beta releases of Deer Park (that is, without
--enable-official-branding), I think your proposed naming of the RPMs is quite
reasonable.