563983 - Please generate a snapshot of all existing update responses AUS can give

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Release Engineering :: General, defect, P5)

Description

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

Given the product/version/platform/buildnum/locale/channel directory structure, which combinations will AUS return a useful update XML response to as opposed to an empty xml response?
I suggested something along the lines of just recording the output of a find command:
find /base/aus/dir -name 'update.txt'

But it sounds like there are complications so I'm filing this bug to track the request. Ideally, the process would be something that can be run on demand and eventually hopefully scheduled to run regularly.

The use of this data is to allow Metrics to generate a dashboard highlighting Firefox installation "abandonment pools".  Particular builds that large numbers of users are stuck in which receive no opportunity to have an automatic update which brings them up to date.

Comment 1

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

Ben and I were talking about this and it may be useful to have a second dataset which describes the release builds that we've done, shipped to users or not. Then we can prevent 3rd-party builds creating a false positives for abandoned users. I'm imagining a list like this
  Identifier  Version  Platform  BuildID  channel  ADU  offered_update update_OK
  3.6.4_build1  3.6.4    Win32      X     release   #   3.6.4build3      yes
  3.6b3_build1  3.6b3   Linux32     X       beta    #   3.6.3build       no

update_OK is the result of checking that the URLs AUS returns point to are valid (not a 404, size and hash match)

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

I'm not sure what to do with this bug. I thought it was going to be a bit easier than it turned out to be, and seems very low priority now. In the grand blue sky future AUS3 (583244) this probably gets a lot easier, since the backend is likely to be a database. In any case, I doubt I'll be getting to this anytime soon, so I'm resetting the assignee.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

I just talked to Daniel about this. The problem he's looking to solve is to get a list of Firefoxes that we've shipped, and that are at a dead end in terms of updates - aka, stranded. We're still talking about exactly who/how to do this, but this bug as it stands is definitely a WONTFIX.