1255790 - wrong ACCEPTED_MAR_CHANNEL_IDS+MAR_CHANNEL_ID for esr45

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1255245

(Release Engineering :: Release Requests, defect)

Description

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

While investigating bug 1255591, I discovered that the ACCEPTED_MAR_CHANNEL_IDS and MAR_CHANNEL_ID are both set to "firefox-mozilla-release" for esr45 (https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/esr45/browser/confvars.sh#L52). This is inconsistent with earlier ESRs, where we've set it to "firefox-mozilla-esr". This is problematic, because it means there's no one MAR we can serve all of the ESR users - if we serve them MARs with "firefox-mozilla-esr", 45.0 users won't be able to apply them. If we serve them MARs with "firefox-mozilla-release", the rest of the ESR population won't be able to apply them.

The most likely solution to this is to switch esr45 to the same channel id as old esrs (more on that later) with a two step approach:
1) Update ACCEPTED_MAR_CHANNEL_IDS to "firefox-mozilla-esr" for the next release.
2) After the next release, change MAR_CHANNEL_ID to "firefox-mozilla-esr"

After we ship releases with these two changes in them we'll be back in a state where ACCEPTED_MAR_CHANNEL_IDS and MAR_CHANNEL_ID are the same as they were for previous ESR cycles. We'll need users on 45.0.0esr to watershed through the release that changes ACCEPTED_MAR_CHANNEL_IDS, but they'll be able to update to the latest from there. Happily, because we caught this so early, we'll can have it completely fixed by 45.2.0esr, which is the first release where we update ESR38 and lower to the latest IIRC.

Comment 1

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

It's possible we might need to do some special mechanics to make ACCEPTED_MAR_CHANNEL_IDS get updated...I'm not sure that's included in the MARs normally. This plan could use another set of eyes overall, too.