819379 - Nightly updater on Linux unable to connect to the update server

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

My nightly install of desktop FF on Linux doesn't seem to update. I'm using Linux Mint 12 ("Lisa") which came with a version of FF 8.0 that didn't self-update. Eventually I got around to installing nightly in the hopes that it would a better job of self-updating. Since FF 8.0 was installed in /usr/lib/firefox-8.0 with a symlink at /usr/bin/firefox, I unpacked the nightly tarball into /usr/lib/firefox-nightly (sudo required) and modified the symlink at /usr/bin/firefox to point to the new version. Starting firefox from the start menu now opens nightly.

I get notifications of new updates in nightly with the usual now/later dialog. When I select the option to update, it pops up a dialog with title "Software Update", subtitle "Downloading Nightly", and an indeterminate progress bar with the message "Conencting to the update server..." which never completes. It just sits there.

I can help debug this further if needed; let me know.

Comment 1

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

Could you try a fresh installation in a new directory to try to reproduce? Thanks

Comment 2

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

I did a fresh install into ~/Downloads/ and will update this bug once I get an update prompt, which probably won't be until Monday.

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

When I got in this morning the nightly install in ~/Downloads/ had self-updated and had the "Restart now/Restart later" dialog showing, so it seems to work as expected there. Is it expected behaviour that the updater doesn't work the same way when I install as root to /usr/lib?

Comment 4

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

Chances are the permissions are incorrect on the directory for which there have been bug reports of this type off and on. There is also bug 529748 to try to provide the ability to update on Linux in this situation (possibly by using sudo).

I'll leave this open for now and you can get support with setting the permissions at https://support.mozilla.org/ . Please comment in the bug when you do. Thanks

Comment 5

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

The only article on SUMO I found related to this was https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux?esab=a&s=install+firefox+linux+for+all+users&r=0&as=s which explicitly doesn't cover installing to a common system folder (it basically says each user should have their own copy of FF). Do you have a pointer to an article that provides more information?

Also I still think it would be nice if the updater dialog provided a useful error message rather than spinning endlessly when trying to download the update.

Comment 6

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Is there anything to do here, or should this bug just be closed WONTFIX?