356337 - automated update checks not working

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Lately the automated update checks don't seem to be happening on my 1.8 branch nightly installation.  Manually selecting Help -> Check for Updates works fine (Firefox finds an available update and takes me through the process of updating), but the application never prompts me on its own.

At preed's suggestion, I fired up a second instance Firefox with a new profile.  It's been running for about half an hour, and it hasn't prompted yet either.

Comment 1

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

On a new profile, there appears to be one unit of app.update.interval before the first update query occurs. For the default settings that's a whole day. 

Test method: 
1, edit <firefox_dir>/defaults/pref/firefox.js to change
    app.update.auto     --> false  (so the prompt shows)
    app.update.interval -->    60  (1 minute)
    app.update.timer    -->  6000  (6 seconds)
2, start suitably old Firefox and create a new profile
3, wait 1 minute, update offer appears, click later
4, close Firefox, wait more than 1 minute and reopen, update offer appears soon after launch

So for a shorter interval it seems to work ok. I see the same results with the 20061010 Linux Firefox build from the 1.8 branch and an old 1.5.0.6 build. 

Could this just be that checking once per day isn't very useful for a daily event ? It wouldn't be too hard to end up in the situation where the update check occurs well after a nightly is produced. I usually set app.update.interval to 3 hours for this reason. Perhaps the default value should be considered for nightlies (maybe controlled by the official branding switch).

Comment 2

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

> Could this just be that checking once per day isn't very useful for a daily
> event ? It wouldn't be too hard to end up in the situation where the update
> check occurs well after a nightly is produced.

It's been over a day, and still neither the fresh profile nor my regular profile have prompted me to update, so I don't think this is the problem.

Comment 3

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

dveditz and jpatel helped me figure out that automatic checks were disabled in my profile.  I've now enabled them, and if I get updated normally over the next couple of days, then that'll indicate that this bug is invalid.

That doesn't explain why I've received automatic updates twice in the last week.  The first time, Firefox updated my build to the following user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2pre) Gecko/20070208 BonEcho/2.0.0.2pre

The second time (a few minutes ago), it updated my build to the following user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2pre) Gecko/20070212 BonEcho/2.0.0.2pre

So there may be another, opposite bug that causes automatic updates to fire even when update checks are disabled.  But that's not this bug, in any case.

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Hmm, and now that I look a little closer, I realize that my app.update.url is set to a custom value:

https://aus-staging.mozilla.org:8711/update2/0/%PRODUCT%/%VERSION%/%BUILD_ID%/%BUILD_TARGET%/%LOCALE%/update.xml

I bet that's also to blame here, and this bug is almost certainly invalid, so invalidating it now.  If I still see problems I'll reopen the bug.