Bug#766249: iceweasel: wheezy force upgraded to 31.2.0esr-2~deb7u1

[Mike Hommey]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 08:18:14PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Mike Hommey <mh at glandium.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 06:05:27PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:
> > > https://www.debian.org/security/faq
> > >
> > > "The most important guideline when making a new package that fixes a
> > > security problem is to make as few changes as possible. Our users and
> > > developers are relying on the exact behaviour of a release once it is
> > made,
> > > so any change we make can possibly break someone's system."
> >
> >
> > So what is the problem now? That the UI changed more visibly than it did
> > before? Then install this:
> >
> > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/
> >
> > Mike
> >
> 
> Well Mike, there are two problems: the one that pisses me off and the one
> you should care about.
> 
> The one that pisses me off is that the particular extensions I use have not
> been ported forward yet (and may or may not be), so upgrading irreparably
> breaks my user experience.
> 
> The one you should care about is that as a responsible system administrator
> I can't even consider deploying Debian to hundreds desktops unless I know
> the quoted Debian standard above is being followed. Nor can anyone else in
> a position to deploy large numbers of Debian desktops. Time comes, I'll be
> asked why not Red Hat and unlike on the server side I won't be able to say,
> "stability."

Wanna bet what Red Hat does? Spoiler alert: the same thing
https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-announce/2014-October/msg00026.html

Reality is that the choice is between not shipping a web browser, or
shipping one that's secure. It's impossible to ship a secure browser
that stays at the same major version anymore[1]. Even when Debian
supported iceweasel 3.5 in its stable release, it was actually a
disservice to users, because backporting some fixes was not enough.

Mike

1. Well, for the major browsers out there (Firefox/iceweasel and Chromium)
It might be possible to support epiphany as long as the webkit APIs it
uses don't change.