666732 - Send freetype version as part of the AUS ping

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

Because of bug 660448, we need to increase our runtime dependence on freetype for Firefox 7. If we don't, users will have a significantly worse experience.

In bug 660448, I dynamically looked up the freetype symbol we need so we didn't need to change build machines. (Updating the Freetype on the build machines is bug 661306.)

In this bug, we need to make sure we don't offer the update to people on Firefox 6 who aren't up-to-date enough.

One question I have is whether bug 655917 is _already_ enough to ensure this.

Comment 1

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

Fixing this will require changes to Firefox 6. :/

Comment 2

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

If we plan on offering Firefox 7 to Firefox versions before 6 on Linux it will need to be fixed in those versions as well. See bug 552924 for an example of where this was done for Mac. :/

Comment 3

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

Joe, what would be the best way to go about detecting the version of freetype? Figured you might already know and save me some time.

Comment 4

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

You can call FT_Library_Version(FT_Library library, FT_Int *amajor, FT_Int *aminor, FT_Int *apatch); alternately, you could just see if dlsym("FT_Library_SetLcdFilter") returns null, and say "freetype = new enough." The former would, of course, let us do different update checks based on freetype version in the future too.

Comment 5

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

Would it be possible to make FT_Library_Version available to JS? It would greatly simplify things.

Comment 6

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

Could you look it up with ctypes?

Comment 7

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

Likely... don't like the idea of app update code depending on ctypes with very little other Firefox code depending on it especially with any breakage along the way potentially breaking app update. I'll look into it.

Comment 8

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

Minusing this based on (extensive!) triage discussion today.

After substantial discussion, we've decided that Christian will ping security-announce@ to see which distros are likely to have users on the older freetype versions so that we can shut down updates to those users based on the existing OS information in the AUS ping (effectively de-supporting them). We expect this list to be quite small, and only to hit some users on those distros since:

a) the version we need was released in 2008
b) distro-bundled versions aren't at issue here, just individual downloads of Firefox on those distributions

This means no change to the AUS ping is needed. I think that makes this WONTFIX, but I'll let Joe and Rob make that call.

Comment 9

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

Are we going to close this as WONTFIX then ?

Comment 10

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

No, I will likely add it. I was mainly adverse to adding it so late in the cycle.

Comment 11

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

Since this hasn't been needed and there is plenty of other work to do resolving as wontfix.