Firefox channels (Nightly, Aurora and Beta) in F16

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Tue, 2011-07-12 at 01:07 +0200, Maciej Małecki wrote:
> Hello everyone!
> 
> As it is my first mail to this list, let me briefly introduce myself:
> I am Maciej Małecki, software developer based in Poznań, Poland. I've
> been using Fedora since F11 (and I love it).
> 
> The point is: is there a chance to have Mozilla Aurora, Beta and
> Nightly in F16 repositories? I think it would make life easier for
> quite many people. Now installation process is to download .tar.gz
> from Mozilla, unpack to /usr/lib64/firefox-7 (for Aurora) and create a
> .desktop file in /usr/share/applications.
> 
> Mozilla guys discussed it here:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600317, however most of
> the links are outdated/404.


I'm not claiming to speak for the Firefox maintainers, but I think it
would probably be an unfair amount of work to expect from them.
Packaging such a complex suite of software such as Firefox takes a lot
of work, especially when dealing with new dependencies.

I think the only reasonable request we can make of the package
maintainers is that to make sure the stable releases are available in
the official repository.

That said, there's no reason an intrepid group of volunteers could not
create their own add-on respository (either on FedoraPeople or another
hosting provider). They just need to be aware of all the pitfalls of
packaging Mozilla software.

In truth, it's probably easiest all-around for those users actually
willing to install alpha and beta software on their systems to just
download the upstream binary tarball and do a local install in their own
home directory. This requires no packaging (as the entire install is
located in their personal space instead of having to manage many RPM
dependencies and file conflicts with other versions of Firefox.
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