Re: [gentoo-amd64] Seamonkey vs Mozilla cage match round two

[Michael Weyershäuser]

felix@×××××××.com wrote:
> Something else about this seamonkey vs mozilla conflict has been
> bugging me.  Why are the two even in conflict?  Firefox is not in
> conflict with either one.  Can't they coexist?
>
Just take a close look at the history of those two packages and their
current status and you should be able to answer that to yourself.

The Mozilla suite is what came out after Netscape decided to opensource
their communicator. At some point Mozilla devs decided that the codebase
was just too complex and rather than fixing it a rewrite would be more
appropriate. That's when Firefox and Thunderbird were born (and one or
more pther projects whose names I don't remember for sure... Sunbird?)

After both Firefox and Thunderbird were somewhat mature the devs decided
that it was time to let go of the Mozilla suite. They announced that
development of it was dead and there would be no more releases, not for
new features, not even for any kind of bugs. Some users of the Mozilla
suite were unhappy about that and started a new project which should
resurrect the Mozilla suite: Seamonkey was born.

Now Firefox was designed to live alongside Mozilla, thereofr the same
goes for Seamonkey. But Seamokey and the Mozilla suite are basically one
and the same program. It was just renamed at some point and then further
developed under the name "Seamonkey". That is why they don't get along
that good.

Another thing you should be aware of: As development (and even
bugfixing) for Mozilla has ceased quite a while ago the last release has
a number of security bugs that are well known and wide open. Any program
using parts of Mozilla are therefor vulnerable as well. For that reason
you shouldn't be using Mozilla and instead switch over to Firefox or
Seamonkey. It will be removed from the tree sooner rather than later.