These damn updates are driving me nuts.

Can someone decipher this mess of crap below?

When I am on the firefox site it tells me.
How can that be? I just did:
The system updated stuff for about half an hour, among
them was firefox. Then I rebooted.

Still firefox site tells me:

1. Which site?

2. slackpkg update just updates your meta-information about packages, but not any packages. Use slackpkg upgrade-all.

Okay, I will give it a try. BTW, what is meta-information?

Okay, that did not take long here is what happened:

All Slackware tools have associated man pages worth reading, thus to know more just type for instance:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

The site offers to download version 35.0.1. I'm on Slackware 14.1 with FF ESR 31.4 (
mozilla-firefox-31.4.0esr-x86_64-1_slack14.1), which technically is an older version.

Personally, I'm fine with the version provided by PV for Slackware 14.1, can't complain.

I have just concluded that various pages on the
internet have no real clue as to whether or
not I have a problem with firefox, and its
plugins, but they keep telling me that I do.

What leads to me to believe this is this following
record of actions I followed.


Here is some of my efforts:
=====================================
bash-4.2# slackpkg upgrade firefox

Checking local integrity... DONE
Looking for firefox in package list. Please wait... DONE

No packages match the pattern for upgrade. Try:

/usr/sbin/slackpkg install|reinstall

=======================================
bash-4.2# slackpkg install firefox

Looking for firefox in package list. Please wait... DONE

No packages match the pattern for install. Try:

/usr/sbin/slackpkg reinstall|upgrade


bash-4.2# slackpkg reinstall firefox
Looking for firefox in package list. Please wait... DONE
========================================

When I use help on firefox program one
item is "about firefox"
That item tells me firefox is 17.0.11 firefox is up to date.
========================================

So everything should be okay, right?
=======================================
I get on youtube.com and it tells this
in the box that displays videos.
after I have reinstalled firefox:
====================================
Clicking on check for updates, I get:
Looks like you're using an older version of Firefox.
=================================
That is where this all started.

Why do you suppose on one page it tells me I am up to date
and on another it tells me I am running an older version.

This is going nowhere. I really don't have a problem,
other than various programs telling me that I have
a problem.


My problem seems to be idiots that program these various
sites don't have a clue how they are programing them to
detect problems.

Pat doesn't always keep up with the latest releases on stable. I'd imagine if there were some glaring vulnerability, he'd update it, otherwise it can just be too troublesome keeping up with new versions with all of his supported Slackware versions just because an older ESR is no longer supported by Mozilla. Just use ruario's script to get the latest Firefox.

https://gist.github.com/ruario/9672798

If you want to force the latest ESR build rather than the absolute latest, run export FFESR=y before running the script.

@EldonCool, here's the probable breakdown.

• Firefox itself - since you don't have write permissions as the user running Firefox, it won't offer any updates, since you, as your logged in user, can't update them (and also because those updates might have to come from a maintainer rather than directly from Mozilla, since Mozilla doesn't know how Firefox was packaged and released by the distro maintainers).
• slackpkg - if Pat hasn't put out any updates for your version of Slackware, this won't result in any newer editions. Pat has to package them as patches for your version of Slacwkare before they show up here. You can verify this by checking the patches/ directory of your version at your favorite Slackware mirror. If there is a version there that slackpkg isn't showing, you likely have slackpkg configured wrong or haven't properly updated it.
• youtube - Youtube is probably referencing either Flash or Firefox's internal html5 player. I believe youtube just made the switch to default to html5 for all videos, and if you're using an out of date Firefox, that could lead to the error.

The package name is mozilla-firefox, not firefox, that's why slackpkg can't find it with the name firefox.

That said, you should really follow instructions in the Securities Advisories and even better subscribe to the slackware-security mailing-list.

Thanks for the thoughts, I will look into them, in length.

In the future, you can check /var/log/packages to see what packages you actually have installed and what their full names are.