Jon Peatfield wrote:
> 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.
>

We have also a lot of complains since a few weeks here. I observed many 
crashes of firefox and thunderbird recently on my system. It would be 
nice, if somebody could compare firefox/thunderbird rebuild from srpms 
with these "new" firefox/thunderbird running on a RHEL5 system.