[tbb-dev] [Tails-dev] Should we delay Tails 3.2? [Was: Tor Browser release is postponed by two days]

[intrigeri]

Hi,

Georg Koppen:
> anonym:
>> Georg Koppen:
>>> Just to inform you about things we learned a couple of minutes ago: the
>>> Firefox release is due on Thursday. It got postponed by two days mainly
>>> to give 57 beta more publicity.
[...]

>> Still, it makes me want to remember/re-evaluate *why* we always
>> wait on Mozilla.
>> 
>> What are your feelings around this? What are the arguments for/against releasing early?

> Not sure what you mean with "early", probably not as soon as one
> critical security bugfix lands on the esr52 branch (because there are
> many :) ). Releasing once candidate build1 is done then? It sometimes
> happens that additional changes get pushed and a buildN is done or that
> some of the patches need to get backed out due to issues Mozilla found
> during their Q&A. I guess you don't want that risk either?

Sure.

>> TBH this has always seemed odd to me. I remember argument for this being about us
>> behaving like good Free Software community members by coordinating releases.
>> I wonder if they really care, especially given our users' position. So, let's
>> ask them!

> I don't know whether they care but that argument has some weight for me
> at least.

Same here.

But even putting ethical considerations aside, there's a strong
technical argument in favour of waiting for Mozilla: their release
engineering team is a much better position than us to judge when their
code is ready to be shipped to users, and I don't think we should
second-guess them.

Now, I'm open to making the occasional exception e.g. when we're
certain that the *only* reason Mozilla has to delay a release, that
they otherwise consider as "ready to ship", is about
marketing/communication wrt. channels we don't track ourselves.
If/when we do so, we should be extremely clear (e.g. in our changelog
and release notes) that we're shipping something based on what will
probably become FF ESR x.y.z, and not something based on FF ESR x.y.z.

In the case at hand, Georg wrote "mainly" so it's not clear to me what
other reasons they have for delaying the release. Until this is
clarified, I don't think we're in a good position to tell we can go
ahead without waiting. Georg, can you please share any other info you
have (possibly privately to tails-rm at boum.org if needed) or put anonym
in touch with the Mozilla release engineering folks who could answer?

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri