If I go to Firefox’s website, I see that they don’t even provide an .rpm file now let alone office repo.
Instead, fedora provides a bz2 zip file called firefox-77.0.1.tar.bz2 (as of 07-June-2020). When unzipped, you will find like a portable version of firefox. The below article calls it a pre-compiled version. Not sure if it is an accurate terminology. And you need to create soft link for /usr/bin/firefox using the ‘portable’ version of firefox binary you got by unzipping.
Back to my topic :
So, everytime firefox releases a new version, developers at Fedora have take it and add it to Fedora’s “updates” repo so that fedora users can run “dnf --refresh upgrade firefox” to upgrade. Right ?
Isn’t this kind of double work ? Plus, there could be delay in firefox releasing a new version and Fedora guys discovering it and adding to the “updates” repo. Can’t firefox just provide its own official repo ?
You’ll have to ask Firefox that. The Fedora community can hardly ask a developer to provide repositories.
I think you’re not very clear on how/why Linux distributions exist. To extend your argument, what is the reason for Fedora or another distribution to provide packages in their repos at all? All developers should simply provide repos themselves and let users install things? Why only Firefox?
The whole point of a Linux distribution is to integrate all the thousands of software there is in the FOSS eco-system and provide it to users in a convenient, well tested OS. This is what Fedora and all the other distros do. Learn more about Fedora Quality Assurance (QA) here:
To answer your question about updates: package maintainers in Fedora actively monitor updates. Anitya helps us. It checks the version of a software in Fedora and files a bug if it isn’t the latest: https://release-monitoring.org/
