Re: Icecat versioning

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Kaminski <address@hidden> writes:
> Hello, the page at https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/ indicates
> that "IceCat is generated from Firefox with the scripts available at
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git.";  Does this mean that
> Icecat can be built against Firefox 68+?

No, the current 'master' branch of gnuzilla.git only works for 60.x ESR.
In general, any given checkout of gnuzilla.git will only support a
single ESR major version number.

The '68' branch contains preliminary work to support 68.x ESR, but there
are several problems yet to be resolved.  In its current form, the
result does not deserve the name "IceCat".

I've attached a patch which, when applied to the '68' branch', addresses
some of the remaining problems.  Most notably, it fixes a problem
whereby, on the first launch of the new version, it informs the user
that they must now give their Email address and register an "IceCat
Account" (which wouldn't work anyway) and leaves the user with a fresh
new profile that's missing all of their old bookmarks, history,
settings, etc, and without making it obvious how to recover them.

The attached patch solves that very annoying problem, and also changes
the default search engine to DuckDuckGo.

FYI, in order to address the recently announced security flaws which
affect IceCat 60, I recently pushed an IceCat update to GNU Guix, to
which I assigned the version "68.2.0-guix0-preview1" to reflect that
this is only a preview, and not an official IceCat release.  It does not
yet meet the privacy standards of the IceCat project.

With the attached patch applied to the '68' branch, the resulting IceCat
should behave more-or-less than the same as the preview release
currently in GNU Guix.

      Mark

icecat-gnuzilla-fixes.patch
Description: Gnuzilla fixes for the 68 branch