726784 - No way to distinguish between Thunderbird 10 and Thunderbird 10 ESR

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Installer, defect)

Description

[ghoffer]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.46 Safari/535.11

Steps to reproduce:

Using SCCM to detect, deploy and update Thunderbird 10 and Thunderbird 10 ESR.


Actual results:

Registry info is exactly the same for both Thunderbird 10 and Thunderbird 10 ESR.  This makes it impossible to provide software updates, run inventories or reports via such systems as SCCM as the system will see no difference between the two versions.

This behavior will cause a lot of frustration for enterprises which often use such system management servers as SCCM.


Expected results:

The registry info added when Thunderbird 10 ESR is installed should clearly indicate it is an ESR version.

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Although different program package is provided for different locale, Mozilla's concept is (1) "en-US locale modules" + (2) "language pack" + (3) profile. Because only single (1) is used as application program, software registration to system is always same, and "install of Tb of different locale" is same as replace of prior application release.
So, following entry is commonly used by any locale.
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird 10.0.1
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird 10.0.1\bin
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird 10.0.1\extensions

However, each installer also writes following entries.
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird\10.0.1 (en-US)
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird\10.0.1 (en-US)\Main
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird\10.0.1 (en-US)\Uninstall
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird\10.0.1 (ja)
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird\10.0.1 (ja)\Main
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird\10.0.1 (ja)\Uninstall
These entries are not written by installer of Tb 10 ESR or are not written if Win7?
Or you say "new entry like next is needed"?
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird 10.0.1\locale

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

He probably wants to see an ESR-specific registry entry for identification like
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Thunderbird 10.0.1 ESR

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

On the other hand, the actual update channel is provided in the default preferences, which is defaults/pref/channel-prefs.js of the installation folder. It can be manually changed to jump on a different channel. Is there any way for SCCM to read that file?

Comment 4

[ghoffer]

SCCM detects software using registry info, file info or a WMI query.  It reads file metadata and attributes such as the file version, but it does not read any info contained within the file itself.

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

As per the enterprise working group, and bug 726781, the workarounds for this (or potentially better solutions) are currently to examine either:

- application.ini (for comm-esr10 in the SourceRepository field in the [App] section)
- defaults/pref/channel-prefs.js for "esr"

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

We don't have two different versions anymore. -> WFM