Comment 21 for bug 239575

@Dimitrios Symeonidis: Thanks for taking the time to post again, I appreciate and accept your apology.

@John Vivirito:
@Alexander Sack:
I've been thinking about this project, and before proceeding, I'd like to talk with you guys about how backports work for Firefox extensions that have been packaged for Ubuntu.

The thing is, Zotero is still in active development and gets updated fairly frequently. Not as frequently as some extensions (NoScript, for example), but still. The updates fix bugs, add new features, and are definitely worth using.

So, I'd like to find out more about whether the Ubuntu package can get updated as Zotero is updated, which I suppose would involve backports.

If the package cannot be updated, I can see that things could get complicated for supporting users. It would be a shame if the first support step for anyone using an Ubuntu package of Zotero is "uninstall the Ubuntu version and update from the Zotero site." In fact, Zotero already recommends using their site rather than addons.mozilla.org, precisely because there can be a delay before new releases are available there. See the last paragraph here:
http://www.zotero.org/documentation/installation

Maybe it would be better to wait until Zotero development stabilizes. I don't know how long that might take - right now, there's a 1.5 version in public beta-testing, which adds some great features like remote sync of the Zotero database. Here's the development roadmap, it looks like a lot of releases are planned through the coming autumn:
http://www.zotero.org/documentation/development_roadmap

I'll try to bring this up for discussion on IRC in the near future, unless there are other suggestions.