Thunderbird bz 579023 still not fixed even though there is an upstream fix available

[Christopher Aillon]

On 04/23/2010 12:03 AM, Martin Stransky wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we're patching mozilla packages only for really critical issues because
> of mozilla trademarks. We can't put any patch we want to the mozilla
> package and ship it as 'Firefox' or 'Thunderbird'.

To clarify a little further...

The main purpose to get patches accepted by upstream before inclusion in 
Fedora is to make sure we are doing things the right way.  For example, 
some patches may inadvertently break standards compliance, have ill side 
effects with JavaScript, may fix connecting to some mail servers at the 
expense of others, etc.  Since the browser and mail client are an 
integral part of the daily user experience, we don't want to patch 
things which would have an unintended effect.

Also, in the past, certain distributors have altered or broken standards 
compliance in their clients with patches, and in continuing to do so, 
they no longer ship with Mozilla trademarks.  They have effectively 
created a different browser and mail client that behaves differently on 
some web sites or mail servers.  Correctly following open standards is 
extremely important for the internet, and the last thing I want is to 
effectively create a fork in this way.

We do have an agreement with Mozilla and as such, we are permitted to 
use the Firefox and Thunderbird trademarks.  But even if we did not or 
it were decided those marks were not important to us, I strongly feel 
that we should continue do things the right way and get patches accepted 
upstream first.

> I've asked for inclusion at upstream bug,
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550455, if you want to
> speed up the process you can reply there too.

Looking at both the Red Hat and upstream bugs,

The patch actually has already been accepted upstream already on 
2010-04-01, just not in the same branch.  There have been no complaints 
of regression in the bug however from trunk testers.

As Firefox and Thunderbird are high usage and high visibility products 
which tend to get many bugs and patches, we limit consideration to 
certain classes of bugs with high impact.  Based on the number of 
different users commenting and the number of duplicates of the bug, I 
think the impact of the bug was misjudged.  Clearly this is leaving a 
bad taste in users mouths, and I think we have a responsibility to both 
Fedora and Mozilla to include a fix for it.

However, I'd like to put this in updates-testing for several days to 
make sure it does not regress users of IMAP servers that do not suffer 
from this issue.  Given the number of affected users, I think it would 
get high karma relatively quickly, so this is a case where I think karma 
automatism should be disabled.  Let's see if anyone responds negatively 
in say 3 or 4 days before pushing this manually.