intrigeri:
Hi,
Georg Koppen:
anonym:
Georg Koppen:
Just to inform you about things we learned a couple of minutes ago: the Firefox release is due on Thursday. It got postponed by two days mainly to give 57 beta more publicity.
[...]
Still, it makes me want to remember/re-evaluate *why* we always wait on Mozilla.
What are your feelings around this? What are the arguments for/against releasing early?
Not sure what you mean with "early", probably not as soon as one critical security bugfix lands on the esr52 branch (because there are many :) ). Releasing once candidate build1 is done then? It sometimes happens that additional changes get pushed and a buildN is done or that some of the patches need to get backed out due to issues Mozilla found during their Q&A. I guess you don't want that risk either?
Sure.
TBH this has always seemed odd to me. I remember argument for this being about us behaving like good Free Software community members by coordinating releases. I wonder if they really care, especially given our users' position. So, let's ask them!
I don't know whether they care but that argument has some weight for me at least.
Same here.
But even putting ethical considerations aside, there's a strong technical argument in favour of waiting for Mozilla: their release engineering team is a much better position than us to judge when their code is ready to be shipped to users, and I don't think we should second-guess them.
Yes, I agree with that.
Now, I'm open to making the occasional exception e.g. when we're certain that the *only* reason Mozilla has to delay a release, that they otherwise consider as "ready to ship", is about marketing/communication wrt. channels we don't track ourselves. If/when we do so, we should be extremely clear (e.g. in our changelog and release notes) that we're shipping something based on what will probably become FF ESR x.y.z, and not something based on FF ESR x.y.z.
In the case at hand, Georg wrote "mainly" so it's not clear to me what other reasons they have for delaying the release. Until this is clarified, I don't think we're in a good position to tell we can go ahead without waiting. Georg, can you please share any other info you have (possibly privately to tails-rm@boum.org if needed) or put anonym in touch with the Mozilla release engineering folks who could answer?
The delay was planned due to Firefox 57 Beta getting more publicity. I used "mainly" because Mozilla needed this time six candidate builds for Firefox 56 fixing, among others, last minute crash bugs (the last candidate build got kicked off yestderday). I am not sure whether they would have delayed the release for those, though. They might have shipped follow-up releases instead. So, I think it is fair to summarize the situation that Firefox 56 (and Firefox 52.4.0esr) got delayed by two days due to PR/publicity requirements (which fit very well to the technical issues (and solving them) related to this release cycle).
Georg