308048 - Once again release .zip's for milestone\beta releases

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[u88484]

Per Asa's Blog http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007797.html
"There are scores of additional reasons that people want the zipped builds, but
right now there are too many differences between the zipped and installer builds
and we cannot afford to let millions more get zipped builds that may break them
when they try to get a security update."

Well now the update system is working great with .zips can we please now again
release .zips for milestone/beta releases?

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Tens of times I had to give people a link to the last nightly build before the
release because they could not use the installer (limited account or errors
during the install).

Comment 2

[Adam Guthrie]

*** Bug 310991 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[lowlymortal]

If this bug is not going to be fixed, would some knowledgable Firefox developer write a small HOW-TO about how to extract the relevant files from the currently released .exe installers so to get Firefox installed manually?

Comment 4

[u88484]

How about for 3.0 since this didn't get any attention for 2.0?

Comment 5

[Kai Liu]

The most recent candidate's unsigned dir has the zip that corresponds to the final release, so for 3.0.0, it's <ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.0rc2-candidates/build1/unsigned/> for Win32.  So the zips are created and hosted for releases (not just nightlies).  It's just that they aren't easy to find if you don't know where to look.

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

We're not going to produce official zips, it adds load to build/QA resources, and there is not a substantial enough benefit to justify the added work.  there are zip builds for the exceptional cases, but we're not going to make them official or officially supported.

Comment 7

[Kai Liu]

But build is *already* producing zips of every official beta/rc/final release; all that's needed is to copy them to a more discoverable area.  So while I agree that the benefit is not significant (though one of the things that greatly appealed to me about Phoenix/Firebird back in 2003 was that it was available as a zip), the cost doesn't appear to be that high either.  If you are worried about what QA implications there may be with blessing the zips with the "official" moniker, you could still place the builds in a more easily discoverable area without calling them official.

Comment 8

[u88484]

(In reply to comment #7)
> though one of the things that
> greatly appealed to me about Phoenix/Firebird back in 2003 was that it was
> available as a zip),

same here as well as a lot of people.  I have still never downloaded the executable file for nightlies, betas or release builds.

> you could still place the builds in a more easily
> discoverable area without calling them official.

That would be great!