Re: Old binary release, why?

[bill-auger]

On Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:45:43 +0200 lonyelon wrote:
> Isn't this a
> problem? Is it due to lack of developers to keep the binary releases
> updated? If that's the case I can help a bit :).

help is always appreciated

it is not much of a problem inherently, because the icecat
binaries are only for *nixes - it would be a problem for OSes
which lack proper package management; but gnuzilla no longer
targets those OSes - users of the OSes, which the icecat binary
package could run on, generally should _not_ download/install
software from any website, but only use software from their
distro's repos

even if the website is gnu,org, still there is no need to
install that way - it is more robust (and more convenient really)
to install from a package (.deb, .rpm, or similar) which was
compiled on your specific distro and intended to be compatible
with your specific distro - for that reason, upstreams (such as
gnuzilla) generally do not need to publish any binaries - it is
normally left to distros, to compile and package it for their
users - that is entirely what distros exist for

IMHO the problem with that the binary today, is that it is still
presented on the website at all - icecat v60 is past end-of-life
and neither mozilla nor gnuzilla are supporting it - that
enticing link to v60 binary should have been deleted from the
icecat web page long ago - it suggests (loudly) to the casual
passer-by, that the project is inactive, which it is not

the optimal solution is to convince more distros to package
icecat - if your favorite distro does not (or will not) package
it, the next best solution is to install guix (which most
distros do package) and use guix to install icecat