Downgrading Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3.0

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed May 13 12:55:04 UTC 2009


Nathan Grennan wrote:
>    I understand, but on the other hand does Fedora want a dozen bug
> reports over Thunderbird being useless, because of a crappy default?

The problem is that Fedora can't change anything in Thunderbird (nor
Firefox) without upstream buy-in because the maintainer refuses to rename
the programs and thus we're bound by Mozilla's strict (and IMHO completely
unreasonable and unacceptable in the Free Software world) trademark policy.

I'm really fed up of all the special treatment Mozilla is getting over this,
for example the xulrunner/firefox/thunderbird stack is now the ONLY one
excluded from provenpackager commits, if all projects worked like this
(i.e. required upstream's approval for every single patch), Fedora would be
completely unmaintainable. I really don't see why we don't just rename
Firefox and Thunderbird like Debian is doing. (Well, I think I see it –
conflict of interest anyone? (*) – but I don't see that as being a valid
reason.)

(*) check who the primary maintainer of Firefox and Thunderbird in Fedora is
and who he's involved with, draw your own conclusions...

        Kevin Kofler




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