1128240 - Investigate how we can automatically get firefox releases date

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Testing :: mozregression, defect)

Description

[Julien Pagès (:parkouss)]

Right now we manually update mozregression source code to get the firefox release dates. I think that we may find a way to do that automatically.

As far as I know, releases are listed here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar. The interesting table is in "Past branch dates" section, and the columns "merge date" (for the date) and "central" for the release number.

I propose that we get information directly from this web page. as we already use BeautifulSoup it won't be too hard I suppose.

Another step (probably later) may be to let the prefetch script do that - save information in a json file, and mozregression would just have to get the appropriate json file. For now, We can include this logic on the client side.

To do that, I would rewrite the utils.releases() function to return the list (this time not hardcoded). I think we must implement some cache (probably just a global variable) to only get the data once from the server and store that for later use.

Will, what do you think ?

Comment 1

[Julien Pagès (:parkouss)]

So, this has been discussed with the #releng team. We can not use https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar because it is a wiki, and format may change.

There is a way to get this information in a machine readable way: http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/libs/product-details/json/firefox_history_major_releases.json?view=co&content-type=text%2Fplain. Unfortunately, this url will change in some months. So let's not change anything in mozregression code until the url has changed and become more stable.

Comment 2

[Julien Pagès (:parkouss)]

We should update the currently hardcoded releases dates.

Will, do you know why we use the release dates of aurora (If I understand well the information in https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar) instead of the release dates for central ?

Comment 3

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

We do this because the merge date for aurora corresponds to the last nightly for that release. See bug 996812.

Comment 4

[Julien Pagès (:parkouss)]

Attachment: update latest firefox release dates

Thanks Will!

Here is a patch to update the latest release dates, and I added a comment to explain how and why we got these dates.

Comment 5

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

Comment on attachment 8613215 [details] [review]
update latest firefox release dates

Thanks for doing this! Hopefully the comment will reduce confusion in the future too. :)

Comment 6

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

You can use https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_history_major_releases.json to get the release dates.

Comment 7

[Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+0)]

Attachment: [Github PR] Fetch merge dates for Firefox versions from hg tags.

Comment 8

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

Ian's recent PR should fix this problem for good. :)