Fedora 15 and Latest Seamonkey Browser

I use Seamonkey (another of the Mozilla browsers - this one includes calendar, HTML editor, Email and News reader) for a very small list of things, not the least of which is as my one browser to access high-security personal stuff. 

I do this so that caching and potential cross-site scripting stuff is contained as much as possible - I use Chrome and Firefox for most of the rest of my browser work but NEVER use them to access my bank "just in case".

I've updated my workstation to Fedora 15, and the Seamonkey it was installed with was version 2.0.14-1 - which complained that it was "old" and needed updating. Unlike on Windows (where doing something as "administrator" even without the correct permissions is easy), updating is not directly automatic with the Mozilla products on Linux.

It turns out that the latest 2.3-1 version is in the updates-testing repository so...

yum --enablerepo="*" seamonkey

got the new version. It found it in the Fedora repository, but in my case it might have been in any of the many others I use, notably the RPMFUSION repos - where extra stuff is sometimes found.

I don't recommend just willy-nilly doing this (enablerepo="*") for everything - that way lies system confusion and more trouble than it is worth. But for individual packages that are subject to security updates more frequently than most things, it is a way to get the latest version most times.

One major caution - do not use the "-y" (for yes, just do it) option when invoking the above command as you really want to take a look at whatever else the system might think needs updating along with the package you want. In this case, nothing else was depended upon by Seamonkey so no other packages were included - but for some updates the dependencies can cause other dependencies and cascade into a huge update that might break other things. In cases such as this, there may be some other way to get the update, or plug the security hole it purports to fix. Again, don't do major updates with the "*" repository flag set unless you really know what you're doing. 

richard

Tag: seamonkey fedora 15 fc15