1654079 - Fall back from more cases of maintenance service staging failure

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Application Update, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Adam Gashlin (he/him) [:agashlin] (ex-moco)]

If the maintenance service can't be started, or it doesn't stop, or the updater thinks the service won't accept its arguments, the updater sets the status to UNEXPECTED_STAGING_ERROR, which is then picked up by Firefox and used to set the state to "pending", so a non-staged, non-service update will be attempted. This avoids having to show the UAC prompt to do staging while Firefox is running, instead showing it the next time Firefox starts up. Otherwise this would cause the update to be abandoned, prompting the user to do a manual install.

This does not apply to error statuses left by the maintenance service or the updater running as SYSTEM (besides DELETE_ERROR_STAGING_LOCK_FILE). Normally we would expect the maintenance service + SYSTEM updater would be able to succeed in more cases than the updater running as the normal user (elevated or not), so it makes some sense to consider any failures permanent. However, there are a number of extra security checks that the maintenance service does, and other ways that it could fail besides just not starting and stopping.

I think it would be good to allow fallback to "pending" in all cases when a staged service update fails.