934099 - Firefox OS doesn't use delta updates

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Vendcom, defect)

Description

[Alexander van Loon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130917102605

Steps to reproduce:

Since I've started using my Geeksphone Peak and flashed it to Firefox OS version 1.1 I get updates almost every day. These updates change little or nothing and the version number is still at 1.1.1.0hd-prelease. I'm not sure what the point of these updates is, but that's a different question I'll ask on the GeeksPhone forum. The problem is that every update weighs in at more than 100 MB.


Actual results:

I remember the 1.1 image which I flashed also had such a large file size, so I assume a complete image of Firefox OS is downloaded with every update.


Expected results:

Such large update consume a lot of traffic, which is a disadvantage for both those who provide the update and the user. This could easily be solved by using delta updates – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_update – which are already implemented for Android and iOS. This allows the update to contain only the portion of the software which has actually changed, which means the size of the update is a lot smaller.

Comment 1

[Andrew Truong [:feer56] [:andrewtruong] [:atruong]]

Triaging via https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/993813#answer-554347 
This is because flashing is different with the OTA update that is actually released. The OTA update is older than the on you'll flash because the one flashed manually is somewhat newer. I'd ignore it at all possible. This is something Geeksphone should maybe fix instead of the people here..

Comment 2

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Ya. it's true we don't by default.  You can create your own MAR file and do incremental updates:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Updating#Generating_an_incremental_OTA_update_MAR

GP, can you take a look at doing incremental updates as well as full updates?  People would need full updates if they are switching versions.  If they aren't switching versions, they probably need a diff of what they have versus what the new version has.

It might be that this would cost too much overhead for geeksphone?

Comment 3

[Alexander van Loon]

Thanks for replying, I'd like to add that when I filed this bug I didn't realize I was using the unstable version which gets updated much more frequently. This is less of an issue with stable version updates I guess.

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on