1373164 - consider changing DevEdition's update channel to something other than "aurora"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Release Engineering :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek [:mgol]]

To reproduce:

1. Open Firefox Developer Edition, ensure it's up to date (currently 55.0b1).
2. Go to the About screen.
3. See the text "You are currently on the aurora update channel".

Firefox Beta shows "You are currently on the beta update channel"; I'd expect the same from DevEdition considering that the Aurora channel is officially dead.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Ben, can you forward this to the right people? :-)

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

This is expected behaviour. Changing the update channel during the transition was extra, unnecessary work. Nobody had a strong desire to change the update channel immediately, so we decided to forego it. We may change it to "devedition" or something like that in the future, but there are no plans to at this time.

Note that even if we do change it, it will not be to "beta" as update channels must be unique for each product. While some channels are currently named after their repos (beta, release, esr) this wasn't always the case, nor is it the case for the "nightly" channel (which builds from mozilla-central).

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Whoops, didn't mean to close this.

Comment 4

[Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek [:mgol]]

I see, thanks for the explanation.

I guess I wouldn't be so surprised if I saw something like "devedition" instead of "aurora" (though I didn't know each product has to have a unique update channel). Since there was a lot of developer-targetted information about sunsetting the Aurora channel as part of the Project Dawn, I was expecting the Aurora branding to disappear completely. Keeping the name may make people a little confused.

That's not a critical issue, obviosuly, so I'll understand if you decide against doing that. Just a nice-to-have.

Comment 5

[Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek [:mgol]]

As the "aurora" string gets added to new places (see e.g. bug 1368632) it'd be good to have a decision on whether the name will be changed or not before it spreads too much.

Who can make a decision?

Comment 6

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Not 100% certain, but catlee and ritu are probably people that would be involved with prioritizing it.

Comment 7

[Ritu Kothari (:ritu) (Inactive, please n-i to RyanVM, jcristau, or pascal)]

I agree with the sentiment in comment 4. We should refrain from using "aurora" nomenclature as much as possible. This is to avoid confusion as Dawn Project was meant to kill aurora repo, update, stabilization cycle from Firefox rapid release cycle.

I would personally vote for this to be done asap (soon). Redirect NI to Sylvestre to weigh in on this too.

Comment 8

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

I agree that we should do it to limit legacy but I am not sure this is urgent :)

Comment 9

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

I also would like to see this done at some point. We made the decision to continue to use 'aurora' in various places to make transition from devedition-is-aurora to devedition-basedon-beta achievable under tight deadlines.

However, I agree with Sylvestre that this is not urgent. Perhaps we can target Firefox 56 or 57 for this change? This will require a 'watershed' for all devedition users, forcing them to update to a particular release before updating to subsequent releases.

Comment 10

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to Chris AtLee [:catlee] from comment #9)
> I also would like to see this done at some point. We made the decision to
> continue to use 'aurora' in various places to make transition from
> devedition-is-aurora to devedition-basedon-beta achievable under tight
> deadlines.
> 
> However, I agree with Sylvestre that this is not urgent. Perhaps we can
> target Firefox 56 or 57 for this change? This will require a 'watershed' for
> all devedition users, forcing them to update to a particular release before
> updating to subsequent releases.

That's a great point. I believe we're already planning a watershed for one of these releases for other reasons, so it would make sense to include this at the same time.

Comment 11

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

This will likely never happen [unless we make it a priority by dropping other work in favor of this work, which will likely never happen].