firefox update to 1.5.0.2 possible?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 4/14/06, Cam <camilo at mesias.co.uk> wrote:
> The update method is still a good one, would it be hard for Fedora to
> patch the in-house Firefox to use a Fedora server with the correct
> binary patches? Then Firefox could do whatever clever things it does to
> make sure that a user's extensions are still in order.

We are NOT talking about user's extentions. Let me re-iterate, the
user-installed extentions updates should still work in fedora's
firefox build. Stop dragging the non-issue of user installed
extentions into this thread. You are only confusing yourself and other
potential readers.

The idea of a fedora specific server to provide binary blobs to the
fedora builds of firefox is absolutely frelling pointless extra work
for fedora to do for a single frelling application.  Its just extras
work on top of releasing an rpm.. extra work that is only going to
benefit a single frelling package in the distribution. A HUGE frelling
waste of limited Fedora developer and instrastructure engineering
time.   If fedora developers want to solve whatever problem you want
solved with the firefox specific update crap is best served by
figuring out something that benefits the distribution in general. 
I'll leave it as an a excercise for you to go into the -devel archive
and read up on threads concerning rpm package level technologies
concerned with small "patch" packages.

You also seem to completely have a lack of understanding of the
general benefits of rpm central management approach. Having binary
blobs that are not handled by rpm transactions means that you break
things like the rpm --verify functionality when you apply those
non-rpm managed binary blobs.

You have to understand that mozilla.org tracks its binary builds and
updates from a central locations for a number of reasons... and the
exposed update mechanims implemented in firefox are designed to
address the specific constraints that mozilla has, partly because
mozilla's distribution policies  don't take advantage of a widely
distributed mirror system and partly because mozilla.org tries to
provide builds for multiple operating systems. Fedora has neither of
these constraints, and the truth of the matter is it would take more
time for Fedora to provide the binary blob updates than it would to
generate the rpm update package.  Whatever problem you want solved, is
not going to be solved by implementing a fedora specific firefox patch
server.

-jef