Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2020 10:19:04 +0000
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
From: Rasmus Thomsen <oss@cogitri.dev>
Reply-To: Rasmus Thomsen <oss@cogitri.dev>
Subject: Moving Firefox to community for 3.12
Message-ID: <637fb2c9ae05ac75a329d7baad6c9153f5051a50.camel@cogitri.dev>
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Hello,

I've recently made a MR to move Firefox to 3.11 which has been merged
in the meantime because I forgot to mark that as WIP (sorry about
that). Some concerns have been voiced over in #alpine-devel that we
shouldn't move Firefox to the community repo since we'd have to upgrade
that across major versions to support it properly. Additionally we'd
also have to upgrade nss, nspr and Rust to the latest versions in the
latest stable release since Firefox tends to have rather strict version
requirements on those. At least for nss and nspr upgrades _could_ be
mitigated by using Firefox' vendored nspr and nss instead of the system
nss and nspr, but that's probably not a good solution.

Rust is a little more complicated since Rust is still in a phase where
it deprecates and removes some things, breaking some crates along the
way. However, as of now I only know of a handful of crates which
actually broke due to these and they broke because they relied on UB
Rustc accidentally allowed (see [0] where Rust made warnings the borrow
checker emitted to hard erorrs). Also, Rust crates like to jump on new
Rust features rather quickly, so I doubt the Rust in our stable
repositories is useful to many anyway. Since Rust doesn't support
stable releases I feel like it's a good idea to upgrade Rust even if
Firefox doesn't get into community.

What do you think of this? I personally feel like it's fine to keep
Firefox in community for stable releases - during the 6 months we
support community for stable releases the maintaince effort shouldn't
be too much.

Regards,

Rasmus

0: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/63565/