created on 18 Dec 2006, by Syndication, read more…
At the recent Firefox Summit, a group of people led by Chris Aillon (Red Hat), Robert O’Callahan (Novell), and myself met to discuss Firefox on the Linux desktop. Historically, there has been a great deal of tension between mozilla.org and the Linux distros, notably over maintenance of branches, divergence between distros, and lack of sustained communication between the groups. All seemed in agreement that closer cooperation and dividing responsibilities appropriately would benefit everyone involved. A number of changes were proposed that have general consensus among the stakeholders.
It is hoped that the proposed changes will drive a stronger and more balanced partnership among Mozilla contributors, and enable the Linux community to work more closely with the Mozilla community. More importantly, we believe this will drive a bigger focus on creating a better Linux user experience for everyone.
Development
In the Firefox 3 timeline, establish a strong group of maintainers to drive and own Linux-specific development. caillon and roc will likely act as owners here. This is not an exclusionary group, anyone wishing to help in this effort will be able to participate and contribute. This certainly includes other projects that are based on or share code with Firefox (Flock, Iceweasel, etc).
This group will share responsibility for branch policies for Linux-specific code. In particular, they may choose to land Linux integration features on branches.
The vast majority of downstream patches will be pushed upstream and into shared CVS, in order to minimize patch sets to distro-specific packaging/build requirements, with minor exceptions from time to time.
Distribution
Most Firefox Linux users are using builds packaged by their Linux distribution. We will encourage this by having mozilla.com’s download page point to packages from various Linux distributions.
The Mozilla Corporation will continue to provide nightly builds for testing and development, and will make available reference builds for each release in an unsupported form.
By minimizing upstream vs. downstream differences, it should be much easier for Linux distributions to comply with Mozilla trademark requirements. The current situation involves a great deal of overhead per distribution due to the large and diverse patch sets. Therefore the Mozilla Corporation will be able to work with more Linux distributions around branding than we have been able to in the past.
Please direct feedback and discussion to the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup, or dev-planning@lists.mozilla.org
