[accountatwork]

> Mozilla devs appear to be completely out of touch with what their core goal should be . . . Instead the Process is holy and cannot be altered

They made a mistake. They then fixed it and admitted exactly what the mistake was. Because they did so, they're called completely out of touch.

I often advocate for my employer to be more open in our postmortems, but responses like this make it impossible for my side to win the argument against folks who claim, quite reasonably, that admitting any kind of mistake will result in people using it against us later.

[semi-extrinsic]

They made a mistake, which broke an API used by many third parties. The fix was very simple. Yet they close as WONTFIX until another dev makes repeated comments that point out this is not tolerable. Then they reopen and fix.

It's the closing and insisting "this is not a showstopper, work around the bug in your third party code", that indicates to me they are out of touch. What happened after that was fine.

[phasmantistes]

Keep in mind the perspective of the people trying to ship Firefox:

* The bug does not break the vanilla (and therefore vast majority of userbase) firefox experience

* The bug is easily worked-around (as opposed to completely unfixable)

* The release candidates were already being built (which means you don't want to make changes, because you have to rebuild+resend to manual QA+resign)

* The bug was merged in as part of a security fix which they can't risk touching

They're not necessarily out of touch. It could easily be that people who didn't have all the details (e.g. release managers who didn't realize the fix was re-adding a single trivial file) were worried about the risks of upsetting a security release.

Sometimes it takes time for the severity of a regression to work its way up to a decision maker. And in the end they did exactly the right thing, with 5 separate people all putting in work on a weekend to make it right.