871975 - Partner Builds are updated from the release channel, so distribution.ini is not updated

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Release Engineering :: Release Automation, defect, P3)

Description

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

In investing bug 842334, it was determined that once a partner build is installed, subsequent updates come from the release channel, not from later partner builds.

So this means that if a partner build makes changes to distribution.ini, those changes are never received as part of an update.

Extensions are also not updated, so if for some reason the user creates a new profile, they will get the down level version of the extension until it is updated via the add-ons manager.

Partner builds should get their updates from partner builds.

Comment 1

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Doing custom updates for every partner build is a very expensive operation. We've created them the odd time in the past for special cases, but doing them with every release would massively increase the time it takes to generate a release - not to mention all the extra time that has to go into testing.

(In reply to Michael Kaply (mkaply) from comment #0)
> In investing bug 842334, it was determined that once a partner build is
> installed, subsequent updates come from the release channel, not from later
> partner builds.
> 
> So this means that if a partner build makes changes to distribution.ini,
> those changes are never received as part of an update.

It might be possible to do updates to distribution.ini files with the vanilla MARs if we can somehow include PATCH-IF instructions for files with the same name but different contents. Rob or Nick - do either of you know if this is possible?

> Extensions are also not updated, so if for some reason the user creates a
> new profile, they will get the down level version of the extension until it
> is updated via the add-ons manager.

I'm not sure how to fix this part. It's a little less concerning as people should be getting their addons updated regularly, but clearly not ideal.

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

> Doing custom updates for every partner build is a very expensive operation. We've created them the odd time in the past for special cases, but doing them with every release would massively increase the time it takes to generate a release - not to mention all the extra time that has to go into testing.

Would it be possible to have them update from release most of the time, but from partner builds when there are changes?

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to Michael Kaply (mkaply) from comment #2)
> > Doing custom updates for every partner build is a very expensive operation. We've created them the odd time in the past for special cases, but doing them with every release would massively increase the time it takes to generate a release - not to mention all the extra time that has to go into testing.
> 
> Would it be possible to have them update from release most of the time, but
> from partner builds when there are changes?

This is technically possible - we don't have the tooling to support it right now though.

There's other potential approaches, too. For example, if the updater supported multiple MARs at the same time, we could apply the vanilla one + a small, partner-specific one.

Comment 4

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

(In reply to Ben Hearsum [:bhearsum] from comment #1)
> Doing custom updates for every partner build is a very expensive operation.
> We've created them the odd time in the past for special cases, but doing
> them with every release would massively increase the time it takes to
> generate a release - not to mention all the extra time that has to go into
> testing.
The distributions system was designed so these files were only updated for special cases as has been done in the past.

> 
> (In reply to Michael Kaply (mkaply) from comment #0)
> > In investing bug 842334, it was determined that once a partner build is
> > installed, subsequent updates come from the release channel, not from later
> > partner builds.
> > 
> > So this means that if a partner build makes changes to distribution.ini,
> > those changes are never received as part of an update.
> 
> It might be possible to do updates to distribution.ini files with the
> vanilla MARs if we can somehow include PATCH-IF instructions for files with
> the same name but different contents. Rob or Nick - do either of you know if
> this is possible?
Each partner's distribution.ini is different so using a PATCH-IF instruction would not help since a release mar would need to have each distribution.ini.

> > Extensions are also not updated, so if for some reason the user creates a
> > new profile, they will get the down level version of the extension until it
> > is updated via the add-ons manager.
> 
> I'm not sure how to fix this part. It's a little less concerning as people
> should be getting their addons updated regularly, but clearly not ideal.
This is also part of the design aiui.

There has not been a need for this in the past (at least from the major distributions which are an extremely small percentage of the total) which is I am fairly certain why distributions was not designed to support what this bug is requesting. With how small the percentage is I think this should either be fixed in the distributions code since it would limit the complexity to the distributions themselves or wontfix'd since this has not been needed in the past as previously pointed out.

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

So it sounds like in the typical partner build scenario (at least as it was originally envisioned) is that the extension aspect is a reasonably static thing? Not something that changes with every release?

Comment 6

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

I believe that the effort to solve that wasn't considered worth it in relation to other work and the number of distributions but asking the people that designed it would be the only way to get an authoritative answer.

Comment 7

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

I'm still not sure whether or not this is something we'd actually do, and if we do, I'm not sure what way we'd approach. Either way, it's not happening in the near future without some clear priority change.

Comment 8

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Please note that the bundled extension can react differently based on some of the default preferences set in distribution.ini. Currently, I was under the natural assumption that distribution.ini is updated together with Firefox updates, so we actively exploit the distribution.ini preference setting. Even if we try to avoid that now, we still have the risk of unforseen interactions, so this needs to be tested. So, that means for our QA:

Currently, they need to test:
* new extension version with new firefox (bundle) (due to download)
* new extension version with old firefox (bundle) (due to ext update)
* old extension version with new firefox (bundle) (due to firefox update)
But now they also need to test:
* new extension version with every firefox bundle version we ever (!) released. (due to ext update)

Comment 9

[Rail Aliiev [:rail]]

I'm going to wontfix this. Feel free to reopen it if you have strong opinion on this ;)