Today while checking something else I noticed that on the 15th TUV
released 'firefox stability update' and 'thunderbird stability update'
packages.
Reading the announcements (and bugzilla entries) I see the following
statements:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2008-0147.html
A stability bug was found in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Firefox
packages released in RHSA-2008:0103. These packages were linked against
an incorrect version of a library which would cause Firefox to randomly
crash while the browser was in use.
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2008-0148.html
A stability bug was found in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Thunderbird
packages released in RHSA-2008:0105. These packages were linked against
an incorrect version of a library which would cause Thunderbird to
randomly crash while in use.
Now in both cases the updated srpm includes an additional patch but no
*obvious* changes to the libraries that the code will link against.
The only explanation I have managed to come up with is that they have
changed their build-environment in some way - different default packages
in their brewbuilder setup perhaps. Does this seem at all likely?
Does anyone have a better explanation of what the incorrect-library
linking issue might actually be?
Now we have users complaining (some quite bitterly) about random crashes
of both firefox and thunderbird and this *seems* to have got noticably
worse about 2 months ago - at least judging by the number of reports we
get via our help-desk. Personally I've not seen any problems but then I
mostly still use the seamonkey on SL3x and don't touch tbird except to
check that it runs :-)
Anyway tomorrow I'm going to try building ffox/tbird from the updated
srpms in the hope that either my rpm build-environment (I've not got
anything fancy yet) is good-enough or the extra patches help in some way.
--
Jon Peatfield, Computer Officer, DAMTP, University of Cambridge
Mail: [log in to unmask] Web: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/
