310302 - Ability to back out an update

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1152027

(Toolkit :: Application Update, enhancement)

Description

[alanjstr]

There are times when an update causes an unstable or broken browser.  For
example, yesterday's nightly patch made the Bookmarks toolbar unusable.  A
mechanism should exist to roll back an update

Comment 1

[John A. Bilicki III]

This would be nice to have.  If it's not marked a duplicate I'll cast my vote for this.

Comment 2

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Something we should definitely investigate for Firefox 3; the ideal place to offer the UI would likely be in the Update History view in the prefpanels.

Comment 3

[Declan Naughton]

*** Bug 348135 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

[e-mail], only a release manager or a developer should set the Target Milestone. As far as I know you are neither, so please don't make changes.

Comment 5

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

Our current update mechanism doesn't have any facility for this and adding it would likely be painful. At bare minimum we would have to keep files around to know what to reverse out and we have a pretty bad record with handling out of disk space errors with the app as well as the updater.

For Windows if we were to implement MSI's and use the MSI update mechanism instead of our own I believe we would be able to do this relatively easily in comparison though I am not saying it would be easy.

Comment 6

[alanjstr]

OK, so I guess this needs a dependency on the MSI bug(s)

Comment 7

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

If this is ever going to happen it will most likely happen in bug 1152027 which implements this as part of startup