782079 - Setup files in "latest" folders to always have the same name rather than using version numbers

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[Terry R.]

This is where the latest release version of Firefox can always be found.

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/

That link retrieves a directory listing.  If one follows the trail to the
binary itself, the link becomes:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/mac/en-US/Firefox%2014.0.1.dmg

The problem isn't the lack of the word 'latest' in the url, but the
presence of a version number in the url.

The problem is that a version number is in the url.  To
reliably retrieve the latest version, users need one url that will
retrieve 14.0.1 today, and 14.0.2 tomorrow.

This could be done:
wget "http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/mac/en-US/$(
curl -s 'http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/mac/en-US/'%7C
grep 'dmg<' | sed 's/.*href="//;s/".*//' )"

But screen scraping a page to get libre software, feels wrong.  It
feels like circumventing access control of some sort.  It looks
ugly, and its prone to breakage.

I know you want as many people to benefit from Firefox as possible.
It would be nice to have a url that can always be used as an API between  scripts and Mozilla -- One url, that users can depend on working every time, and always being the latest version without any human having to click, or
reverse engineer your directory tree.  Have the name simply be Firefox Setup.dmg (exe of course for Windows) in the "latest" folder.

Thanks for your consideration.

Comment 1

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

I humbly suggest the following, if you don't have your heart set on http:

wget ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-i686/en-US/*.tar.bz2
wget ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/mac/en-US/*.dmg
wget ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US/*.exe

Comment 2

[BCrook]

Thanks Chris!  HTTP is not a requirement.  Your suggestion does appear to retrieve the latest version.  How silly of me not to have known about wildcard matching in wget.

This is what I'm running nightly, on an internal server, so that internally, we can always have one unchanging, ever current, url to install from.

wget ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/mac/en-US/*.dmg -N -O Firefox.dmg

Comment 3

[BCrook]

Actually, I spoke too soon.  Because -O always creates a new file, and -N only suppresses re-downloading if the timestamps match, it conflicts with -N, and this won't work.  Also, while I don't care about http.  It might be prudent to use httpS, ftps, or sftp to retrieve something as essential as Firefox.