538399 - create bouncer URL that always points to latest stable version of Firefox

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 398366

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

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

Suggestion from Gerv:

--------

Perhaps we need to have a canonical URL something like:
http://download.mozilla.org/firefox-latest.{exe|tar.gz|dmg}
and encourage people to link to that so links don’t go stale?

Or do we already have something like that?

---------

Talked with bhearsum, and he agreed that it would be pretty easy to do and very much worthwhile. He suggested:

http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linux&lang=en-US

Comment 1

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

The links would end up pointing at, eg, ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/latest/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.5.7.tar.bz2 - where 'latest' is a symlink that we already maintain on FTP.

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> The links would end up pointing at, eg,
> ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/latest/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.5.7.tar.bz2
> - where 'latest' is a symlink that we already maintain on FTP.

probably http://releases.mozilla.org, actually - but w/e.

Comment 3

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

I like the idea of working around the many sites on the internet that point people to old builds but what does this do to the metrics ? Are we parsing request URLs or looking at the 302 sent back? In the former case I think we lose the downloads count on a per-version basis.

Bouncer also wouldn't know the difference between a stale mirror, where the latest symlink points to an older version, and an up to date one. We'd need some extra voodoo in bouncer's sentry to avoid that.

(In reply to comment #2)
> probably http://releases.mozilla.org, actually - but w/e.

Wouldn't they just start /firefox/releases/latest/ like the existing locations ? Ben points out we'd have to update versions each release but that wouldn't be too bad.

Comment 4

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Wouldn't they just start /firefox/releases/latest/ like the existing locations
> ? Ben points out we'd have to update versions each release but that wouldn't be
> too bad.

Yeah, you're right - my bad.

Comment 5

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

See also bug 398366.

Comment 6

[Daniel Einspanjer [:dre] [:deinspanjer]]

I'd vote to have this bug duped out to bug 398366.
If we implemented the logic described in comment #1, we'd be in trouble for metrics as Nick suggests.  Metrics only processes Bouncer logs, we can't see the actual logs for the mirrors since we don't own most of them.

Theoretically, we could have date based logic that tracks what the current release version is for any given date and count any downloads of "latest" to that version, but I'd really rather opt for what bug 398366 suggests which is just to have the alias do a double redirect:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linux&lang=en-US
302s to
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5.7&os=linux&lang=en-US
which 302s to
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/latest/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.5.7.tar.bz2

It is an extra round trip for the client, but I feel it is the easiest to implement and maintain since it requires no modifications to the mirror network.

Comment 7

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

Make sense to me (if you mean "a mirror" after the second redirect).

Comment 8

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Haven't seen objection to duping this, so doing so.

Sorry this wasn't as simple as I thought, Mike/Gerv :(.