Re: Firefox and Debian Testing: Getting Security Updates?

From: Ralph Katz (ralph.katz_at_rcn.com)
Date: 08/17/05

  • Next message: Kent West: "Re: WINE"
    Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:04:39 -0400
    To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
    
    

    On 08/17/2005 02:10 AM, a.list.address@gmail.com wrote:
    > I'm a happy user of Testing, but I'm a bit concerned about getting
    > updates to Firefox in a timely manner. The current version in Testing
    > is 1.0.4-2, which has recently-announced vulnerabilities in it. The
    > vulns (I don't like typing that word :) have been fixed in the version
    > in Sarge, 1.0.4-2sarge1. They've been fixed in Unstable as well, in
    > 1.0.6-2.
    >
    > But when will this version come to Testing? A quick look at the
    > changelog for the package shows that 1.0.5-1, which fixes some
    > security issues, was uploaded to Unstable on July 16th with an urgency
    > level of high, but four days later 1.0.6-1 was uploaded with an
    > urgency of low. Ten days later, on July 30th, 1.0.6-2 was uploaded
    > with an urgency of medium. But here it is over two weeks later, and
    > Testing is still stuck on 1.0.4-2.
    >
    > I looked in the bug tracker, but I couldn't find any good bug to
    > prevent these newer versions from moving to Testing.
    >
    > Now, I'm far from an expert, and I'm still fairly new to Debian (less
    > than a year), but it seems like something needs to change. I don't
    > want to run Unstable on my computer, but I don't want to be stuck with
    > vulnerable browsers either.
    >
    > I could upgrade Firefox to the version that's in unstable, but there
    > are two problems:
    >
    > 1) This is a poor long-term solution, having to manually upgrade
    > packages and their dependencies to fix security problems;
    >
    > 2) I can't even do that in this case, because Firefox 1.0.6-2 depends
    > on libxinerama1, which depends on libc6 >=2.3.5, but Testing is still
    > on libc6 2.3.2.
    >
    > This is simply a mess. Actually, now that I think about it, I suppose
    > the reason 1.0.6-2 hasn't moved into Testing is because of the
    > dependency problem of libxinerama1 and libc6. But who knows when the
    > new version of libc6 will get into Testing? It may be a very long
    > time. In the meantime, are we Testing users supposed to keep using a
    > vulnerable version of Firefox?
    >
    > I know Testing is not supported for security updates, but for
    > high-profile packages like Firefox with high-profile vulns, don't we
    > need a solution for this problem? And upgrading to Unstable is not a
    > solution; there's a reason I and others use Testing instead of
    > Unstable.

    You could safely install the backport 1.06 from Kevin McCarty. See his
    message to this list at
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/08/msg00467.html .

    It's still working just fine for me on sarge.

    Regards,
    Ralph

    P.S. Please also read the related threads mentioned by the other replies.

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  • Next message: Kent West: "Re: WINE"

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