The patch is currently supported in 18.04, may last the life of??
In any event the blog and comments are even worse than the using of 16.04’s package in the image.
Advising users to lock firefox is a terrible idea, this little project has had so many questionable things…
If you want to provide this menu then get a repo, patch and build firefox for whatever Ubuntu release your doing, keep it updated ( plus note Debian/Ubuntu do patch firefox for various other reasons…
(- a handful of users who know where to look get an updated, patched firefox for 20.04, will so while the patch is still viable
@paulw2u@mc3man@nullrequest
Thanks for your feedback. Using Xenial and Bionic repos is only a temporary workaround (that will work until 2023), as many people wanted the Global Menu for Firefox. You are right, I’ll edit the blog post so that users download the latest Firefox updates from the archive.
In the long term, I’ll have to consult some people if maintaining repos would affect our case when I apply for official flavor status in the near future. If not, I’ll consider maintaining it myself or would request the Unity7 Maintainers to help me in maintaining the patch.
@mc3man I hope you’ll understand that I’m working very hard to keep this project alive and running. Please do advise if you find anything questionable and I’ll be happy to answer and address it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
@popeyhere talked about the differences between derivatives, remixes and flavours. As I understand this, remixes like our Ubuntu Unity Remix are allowed to mantain a small number of packages in their own PPAs. I wonder in the future what we’re going to do with firefox. Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Mate all have Global Menu options in their DEs, so the patch for global menu in firefox (and Thunderbird) could actually be important for other flavours as well. Global menus are an important part of Unity. I hope Canonical will allow us to mantain a patched version of Firefox as the one in Xenial repositories.
With official status you need to use packages from the distro series. So I am afraid users will need to forgo this and global menu firefox support for 20.04 and later.
Also, all packages need to be from the standard repository. At this stage remix should be striving to having as close to zero packages in its ppa as possible. The idea is to get remix specific packages into the standard repository via the ubuntu sponsorship route.
I wonder why if 4 flavours need global menus we couldn’t just mantain that patch in the standard repos. If @rs2009 can / wants to mantain that patch will he be allowed to do the work?
With firefox main releases every 4-6 weeks and multiple security fixes between releases, and trying to maintain firefox versions across multiple distro series, that’s a huge number of releases to maintain one patch by one person week after week, month and years at a time.
@fossfreedom do you know who at Canonical is in charge for this task? I wonder how many people are currently involved in mantaining the package for Xenial. I think this is not the only patch they have to apply every week, months and years, because packages have to be compiled, tested and then published to repositories anyway. I wonder how really taxing is for them to add those static lines of codes in addition to what they are already doing…
@fossfreedom it is in fact what I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to estimate what exactly means patching a firefox release to assess if we actually can mantain a patched version ourselves or if we can maybe cooperate with Canonical for this goal.
Grab the xenial source, take the patch and apply it to the beta or nightly firefox upstream sources and try to build packages to 20.04 and 20.10.
That’s the only real way to assess the effort for a community effort.
Remember, you can only have one version of the firefox package in the repository. So any maintenance will only be unofficial. Either via a test ppa or something like a flatpak or snap.
For info only
The firefox unity patch is maintained in bionic.
As far as 20.04 it can be used ex. here noting this ppa is not for general use & most likely I won’t do a standalone 9though wouldn’t be hard.
Hello Rudra! I wanted to take a second to say thank you for the work you’re doing. I’ve been using ubuntu for a very long time and I fell in love with Unity as soon as I used it. Although it was not initially well-received by the Ubuntu community (and has only been grudgingly accepted by some, thanks in no small part to continued development by the ubports team), I saw the potential immediately and have preferred unity over all others since.
One aspect of unity that often gets overlooked by the Linux community is that it is incredibly simple for a computer novice to jump in and use. When my wife and I were only dating, I bought her a laptop and installed Ubuntu with unity before I gave it to her. Despite her having only a basic knowledge of computer use at the time, I taught her how to use Ubuntu in about 15 minutes, she still has the laptop 6 years later is using it as I type, and has never once had a problem which caused it not to boot or to require an OS reinstall.
The greatest value that I see in Unity’s interface isn’t it’s forward-thinking touch friendly layout (which is awesome), but rather the incredible simplicity that it brings to the table for inexperienced users. The applications of Ubuntu/Unity could and should be endless when aimed toward computer amateurs and small business/retail.
Anyway, I’m going to just say thank you again and then hop down off my soap box. I admire your work, and I’ll be following along with your progress.
…and if anyone reading this hates unity, I don’t care. I like it. So nanny-nanny nah-nah… ;p
