342213 - Use installer build to generate MAR files on Windows

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

We currently use Windows zip builds to generate MAR files as part of the repackaging process for Google/Yahoo! builds. This is causing a couple of problems:

* we only release installer builds, and differences in md5sum between the repackaged jar files in the zip and installers builds may be causing partial updates (as generated from the MARs) to fail -> see bug 340879

* repackaging both the zip and installers builds to generate the MARs was fine when we only had to worry about 4 CJK builds, but repackaging 2 x all 39 locales eats some real time (almost 2 hours, total)

We should switch to repackaging only the installer builds on Windows, integrating the MAR creation into that process.

Comment 1

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

Analysis of the update download stats from the last release cycle (regular release, not l10n- or repack-specific) indicate that almost as many full updates were served as partials. We (build team) think this may be due to using the zips to generate the MAR files in the general case for builds on Windows, whereas the majority of users on Windows use installer builds. 

I'm morphing this bug to cover MAR creation in general on Windows. If we can figure out how to build MARs from installers for regular builds, we can apply the same process to the repacks. We don't officially support zip builds on Windows any longer, so having the zip builds as an integral part of our release process probably isn't a great idea anyway.

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This may be a lot easier with the NSIS installer... it's virtually impossible with the xpinstall installer. But I think it might be more productive just to have a reliable comparison script between installer and ZIP builds and fix the differences that are causing problems.