Re: It seems that Firefox is now at 115.0.3esr

[chippy]

Mark, thanks for the explanation.
I understand the updating practice and the reasons behind

On Sun, 2023-07-30 at 16:17 -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> chippy via help-gnuzilla <help-gnuzilla@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Hi everyone, I saw today that Firefox Esr is now at version
> > 115.0.3esr,
> 
> Mozilla are currently supporting two ESR branches: 102 and 115.
> According to their release calendar
> <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar>, they will
> continue supporting version 102 until August 29.
> 
> History shows that IceCat tends not to be updated until upstream
> support
> has been dropped from the older ESR branch.  One rationale for this
> practice is that it gives more time for undesirable behavior in the
> newer Firefox version to be discovered and for mitigations to be
> found.
> 
> > I also saw that there is no 'esr' in between 102.13.0esr and
> > 115.0.1esr. What happened? Did Mozilla Foundation decided to skip
> > some
> > releases?
> 
> Yes, and that's how the ESR branches have always worked.  There have
> only been ESR branches for Firefox versions 115, 102, 91, 78, 68, 60,
> 52, 45, 38, 31, 24, 17 and 10, as shown in the "past releases"
> section
> of the Firefox release calendar that I linked above.
> 
> This approach is essentially the same as what the developers of
> upstream
> Linux (the kernel) do with their long-term support (LTS) releases:
> not
> every stable Linux release branch becomes an LTS branch.
> 
> > I tried to run makeicecat replacing the version numbers (and the
> > checksum of course) but the patch "about-addons" unfortunately
> > failed.
> > I saw the file is sligthly changed, but it should be doable.
> 
> In practice, updating IceCat to a new ESR branch is a nontrivial job.
> You can look at the history of the Gnuzilla Git repository to see the
> kinds of changes that have been required in the past, but those
> changes
> are different for each new release, so one cannot simply use history
> as
> a guide.
> 
> I also consider it important to test each major new IceCat release
> with
> a packet analyzer to detect any obvious attempts to "phone home" to
> servers (e.g. at Mozilla or Google) that were not explicitly asked
> for
> by the web site that the user asked to visit.
This became, in time, a common practice in my daily computing.
> 
> Having said all of this, if you'd like to get started on the process
> of
> updating IceCat to version 115, please feel free to work on it.
> Especially if you are able to get the point of building a mostly
> working
> browser, even if it hasn't been fully tested or has some problems,
> that
> would be a very useful contribution!
> 
>      Thanks,
>        Mark
I'll try as soon as I can and give an update.
Again, thanks for all these info and for Icecat.


Chippy