add an alternative to /usr/bin/firefox

confirming, if the developers find time for this, it would be great! :)

alternatives is nothing normal users know anything about; hence we won't introduce it for firefox.

I didn't know that only bugs affecting normal users are considered, sorry.

I don't understand Mr. Sack's answer. A normal user know nothing about alternatives, sure. But he knows that if he has "Firefox 3.0" and installs "Firefox 3.5", that icon named "Firefox" should start "Firefox 3.5", not "Firefox 3.0". This is how it works everywhere intuitiveness is the goal, starting by Windows. Why should Ubuntu be different? It's just common sense that the button that starts "Firefox", or the terminal command "firefox", or softwares that call a browser to open a link, should all start the latest installed version, not some other, much less not use the one that's running (as happened to me yesterday, when clicking a link in Pidgin started a Firefox 3.0 instance instead of adding a tab inside my opened Firefox 3.5.

It doesn't matter how Ubuntu solves this kind of unintuitiveness, if through alternatives or some other mean, but it should be solved nevertheless. Saying normal users don't know anything about alternatives is sidestepping the issue, not addressing it in any proper way.

The reason given for the "Won't Fix" status didn't seem valid to me, so I changed it back to "Confirmed" and added a more detailed comment.

The reason given for the "Won't Fix" status didn't seem valid to me, so I changed it back to "Confirmed" and added a more detailed comment. (See above)

> The reason given for the "Won't Fix" status didn't seem valid to me, so
> I changed it back to "Confirmed" and added a more detailed comment. (See
> above)
> [...]
>       Status: Won't Fix => Confirmed

I think you shouldn't change the bug status for a comment
clarification. I also think that if you change the bug from "Won't
Fix" to "Confirmed" it indirectly means that you have found or have
created the patch for it. :)

Yet, I agree that this should be implemented if there will be two
versions of firefox in ubuntu 9.10.

please dont change bug state if i set it to wont fix. this won't happen ... intentionally.

> softwares that call a browser to open a link, should all start the latest installed version,

problem here is that alternatives dont solve the problem you are looking for a solution here.

also it "shouldnt start the latest", but it should start the "default". default can either be set by the distribution (shipping the link to right binary) or by user (currently using gnome preferred application dialog). Everything else is not going to be supported (except maybe some kde/xfce specific mechanism).

Asac, I appreciate your work on firefox and I thank you for the information you provided today. I am passing that information along to several user groups who all seem to want FireFox 3.5 NOW, lol. I wish to understand your response to this bug as it seems unclear to me.

Right now the choice of which firefox to run is made by editing the symbolic link at /usr/bin/firefox. Do you intentionally mean you will not accept a patch that implements update-alternatives? It seems you do.

The alternatives systems comes from Ubuntu's Debian heritage and is widely used and known about by users and system administrators. It is a collaborative system useful in managing symbolic links which I think is what we are talking about. Firefox is used in many desktop environments, not just Gnome, KDE and XFCE. I think this system provides a much more robust and flexible solution to this complex problem rather than forcing users to change anything in /usr/bin that is not able to be overridden for other users or purposes.

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ap-pkg-alternatives.html

From man 8 update-alternatives:

update-alternatives creates, removes, maintains and displays information about the symbolic links comprising the Debian alternatives system.

It is possible for several programs fulfilling the same or similar functions to be installed on a single system at the same time. For example, many systems have several text editors installed at once. This gives choice to the users of a system, allowing each to use a different editor, if desired, but makes it difficult for a program to make a good choice for an editor to invoke if the user has not specified a particular preference.

Debian’s alternatives system aims to solve this problem. A generic name in the filesystem is shared by all files providing interchangeable functionality. The alternatives system and the system administrator together determine which actual file is referenced by this generic name. For example, if the text editors ed(1) and nvi(1) are both installed on the system, the alternatives system will cause the generic name /usr/bin/editor to refer to /usr/bin/nvi by default. The system administrator can override this and cause it to refer to /usr/bin/ed instead, and the alternatives system will not alter this setting until explicitly requested to do so.

Here's another reason why it is important to do more than a quick symbolic link hack - the new firefox 3.0 update package overwrite /usr/bin/firefox on my unexpectedly. The "won't fix" tag is clear but the explanation is far from clear.

I think there will only be one official firefox in each release:
http://www.asoftsite.org/s9y/archives/161-FAQ-Why-is-my-firefox-3.5-still-called-Shiretoko.html

Official or unofficial, there are often reasons for multiple versions of firefox even if it's during transitions such as these. People should be able to choose and not have a choice forced on them by packages, especially when there's a well established system in place to give admins and users what they want.