Including RPM's for older versions of firefox (and other applications)

[Andrew Farris]

Warren Togami wrote:
> Rodd Clarkson wrote:
>> With the inclusion of Firefox 3 in f9, how easy would it be to include
>> RPMs for older versions of firefox.
>>
>> I do web development and while I can't wait to be able to use ff3 for
>> personal browsing, I still need to be able to test with ff2 (and ff1.x
>> would be nice too).
>>
>> This is something that has always frustrated me about Windows.
>> Recently, I was offered IE7 as and update.  This is great, as I need to
>> be able to test this browser, but now I have no ie6 to test with.
>> Arghh.
>>
>> Can we do better, by offering installs of older browsers that can be run
>> in parallel to make it easier to test browser based development?
> 
> If you have parallel installs of Firefox, doesn't it try to use the same 
> .mozilla/firefox directory and things go horribly wrong?
> 
> As a web developer you might be better off downloading upstream's binary 
> tarballs and putting them in the homedir of a different non-root user so 
> the different versions don't step on each other.

Using the other version is not a problem if you're using two different profiles 
within Firefox (both profiles get stored in ./mozilla/firefox under different 
subdirs).  The problem with packaging it for a system wide install would be that 
there is no simple way to setup using different profiles for a user who just 
installs the RPM and expects it to work.  I don't see any way around this.

I've used multiple profiles for awhile due to heavily using extensions, so I 
occasionally want to startup a profile with things stripped down.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
  gpg 0xC99B1DF3 fingerprint CDEC 6FAD BA27 40DF 707E A2E0 F0F6 E622 C99B 1DF3
No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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