D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] Firefox blocking

 

On 15/04/14 18:08, Brad Rogers wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2014 10:51:13 +0100
> bad apple <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hello bad,
> 
>> launches IceWeasel instead, which is broken. This is the single most
>> stupid thing on Debian, and you should excise it as soon as possible by
> 
> It may well be stupid, but I think you know as well as I, perhaps better,
> that Debian & Mozilla could not reach an agreement about the use of the
> Mozilla trademarks, so anything using said TMs ended up being excised
> from Debian.
> 
> So, IMO, there's blame on both sides for the situation.


Yes, you are completely right - I'm not even sure it's that stupid, as
Debian and Mozilla were both pretty clear about the reasons and why they
did what they did. On systems like Gentoo or ports on *BSD where the
user compiles from source you actually get a warning about not
distributing the resulting "branded" binaries if you don't disable
Mozilla logos, etc, during configuration. It's certainly not the biggest
problem in the world, to be sure, just a bit annoying.

But it is also annoying that Firefox is a second class citizen on Debian
of all systems, with it's stupid diversion of /usr/bin/firefox to
Iceweasel, insistence on using woefully out-of-date ESR versions, lack
of official support for replacing Iceweasel with proper Firefox and
generally making me jump through hoops just to get my hands on a
functional version of the second most important single tool on my entire
system, ahead of email and just behind the terminal itself!

Configuring, tweaking and generating Nightly firefox builds to maintain
my PPAs, yum/apt repos, BSD ports, Gentoo ebuilds and Arch AURs is
probably my single biggest ongoing headache, not helped by the fact that
Firefox is such a beast of a program and has a big pile of dependencies
as well. Recently a developer friend persuaded me to start using Ninja
to keep all this mess in check and to perform incremental builds, and
it's proved to be a lifesaver. It also makes me feel like I'm down with
the cool kids, that's what they're all using these days (apparently)...
Google use it - I think they invented it actually - to manage their
Chrome builds incidentally.

Anyway, no one cares about my firefox woes, and quite rightly too.

Regards

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq