a plea: please don't deprecate FF 3.6 yet

[Anton Shterenlikht]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 06:07:51PM +0100, Florian Smeets wrote:
> On 16.03.2012 11:13, Beat Gaetzi wrote:
> > 2012/3/16 Anton Shterenlikht <mexas at bristol.ac.uk>:
> >> I'm on ia64, and www/firefox doesn't build.
> >> www/firefox36 is about the only full featured
> >> browser that does build on ia64.
> > 
> > As far as I know not only ia64 is affected by the deprecation
> > of Firefox 3.6. I know that PowerPC is no longer supported
> > in newer versions of Firefox. I don't know the current status
> > of Firefox on sparc64 but I assume that it currenty doesn't
> > build.
> > 
> >> I've several open bug reports with mozilla:
> >>
> >> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=638056
> >> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647830
> >> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=683879
> >> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729447
> > 
> > Thanks, for opening these bugreports!
> > 
> >> I understand it's a pain to keep obsolete
> >> software in ports, and I'm trying to find
> >> a newer alternative. However, with the current
> >> pace of version numbers in mozilla project, FF12
> >> might be coming out tomorrow, and I'm not ready
> >> to migrate from 3.6 yet.
> > 
> > Firefox 3.6 will be end-of-life on April 24th. My intention was
> > to remove it with the relase of Firefox 12 as at that point
> > upstream no longer provides security updates and I like to
> > avoid having vulnerable software in the portstree which is
> > no longer maintained (yes, we also have to update libxul as
> > the current version is based on Firefox 3.6...).
> > 
> > Flo, whats your opinion on this?
> > 
> 
> I agree that we should remove firefox36 as soon as the first
> vulnerability is announced that Mozilla won't fix. Currently Beat and I
> can barely keep up with keeping all the gecko ports up to date. We have
> very little time to fix/improve things already, so we are not in a
> position to start applying security fixes to deprecated ports.
> 
> We should concentrate on making www/firefox-esr (once it's in the tree)
> work on as many platforms as possible.

I understand.

As a user, I do appreciate your work on gecko ports.

Many thanks

-- 
Anton Shterenlikht
Room 2.6, Queen's Building
Mech Eng Dept
Bristol University
University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
Tel: +44 (0)117 331 5944
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