[Labs-l] ubuntu 12

Wed Jul 18 17:12:35 UTC 2012

Fortunately none of packages I need right now for wikimedia project,
but it's a lot of packages I use as a developer, especially mozilla
development packages such as xulrunner or gecko development files,
which makes it pretty hard to compile anything what uses gecko as web
browser engine. The reason to deprecate these was that mozilla does
too frequent releases and it's hard for ubuntu maintainers to create
new versions. However, there is likely many more, as Antoine noted,
ubuntu was always meant as a simple linux for regular people who don't
understand linux, so it quite makes a point that they don't really
care about it being developer friendly. So even if I am not missing
anything for labs right now, it's very possible that ubuntu developers
will just decide to remove some other packages in future, just because
they don't need them for ubuntu, no matter if some other developers
would do (such as whole mono which ubuntu doesn't rely on). For this
reason it would be nice to keep support for other distribution which
is more reliable in this or at least keep support for distributions we
use right now, because it may just happen that when we upgrade to
newer ubuntu, some stuff will break.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2012-April/035026.html
http://askubuntu.com/questions/125980/how-do-i-install-xulrunner-in-12-04

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 6:23 PM, Faidon Liambotis <faidon at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 06:49:18PM +0200, Petr Bena wrote:
>> I was quite disappointed when I saw the number of packages which
>> ubuntu developers decided to deprecate just because it's hard to
>> maintain them. Some of them are mozilla development packages such as
>> xulrunner and others which lot of software, including mono depends on.
>
> What do you mean by deprecate? What's the packages you're missing
> exactly?
>
>> For this reason I would like to suggest that we keep support for
>> ubuntu 10.04 on labs for some longer time as it might be complicated
>> to run some software on latest ubuntu.
>
> I'd like us to avoid 10.04 for new setups. If there's something you're
> missing, we should attempt to push it to the latest Ubuntu releases and
> possibly backport it, rather than trying to support newer versions on an
> more than 2-year old distribution.
>
>> I believe that ubuntu guys will soon understand how important some of
>> the packages were, given to massive amount of help requests related to
>> these packages and eventually restore the support for these.
>
> Which ones are you specifically talking about? Do you have any pointers
> to these discussions? I'm really curious to read the story and the
> rationale behind it.
>
> Best regards,
> Faidon
>
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