* On 2015 07 Mar 16:29 -0600, T.J. Duchene wrote:
>
> > Iceweasel and Chromium are both updated to the upstream-supported
> > version periodically (when the current version is no longer
> > supported). The amount of churn between versions and the number of
> > versions means that it would be very difficult to backport patches.
>
> Yes, certainly. My point was the Debian does not typically swap out
> versions, but efforts backporting security patches to existing software. I
> just find it odd that Debian has a differing standard for maintaining
> browsers. It strikes me as a side effect of the popular "rapid release"
> idea with both of Mozilla and Google. Debian clearly changed their rules in
> order to take advantage of that, and this is the result.

Unfortunately, this sort of inconsistency toward their definition of
"stable" caused problems in other areas. During the time that Wheezy
was stable a utility used by radio amateurs was rendered out of date as
the organization that provided the utility changed cryptographic keys on
the site the utility was used for so that a newer version was required.
I entered a bug report that a backport of the newer version should be
made available to all users of Wheezy. For various reasons it could not
be done in such a way so that the older version would be replaced
automatically. This was a failure of policy in my opinion as while it's
fine to resist churn for the goal of stability, when a package is
unusable due to external factors it should be upgraded.

I would like for Devuan to consider this sort of corner case in the
future and resist the urge to be so beholden to policy as to make the
featured release unusable for a subset of its users.

- Nate

--

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possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

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