"First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"
rhelmer applied the first release tag to the tree—FIREFOX_1_5_0_4_RC3—since the CVS server upgrade.
It took just under four minutes to complete.
For comparison, the old CVS server?
Forty minutes. On a good day morning at 4 am.
(This is the point in the story where we all go hug justdave.)
Went to the Flock presentation this morning on the Browser Technology track. I've never used Flock, so it was interesting to see the demo and look at some of the features they have.
I asked what their automated update story was, since there have been two or three releases of Firefox since the release they're using (which, as I understand it, is 1.5 still).
They said "We couldn't find the code for the automatic updates stuff." Which we know about and are working on fixing. (In fact, I've been working on it at XTech!)
So, how did they solve this problem?
"We wrote our own replacement."
Comments
I wrote a document on setting up your own update server a while ago.
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Setting_up_an_update_server
Posted by: Michael Kaply | May 18, 2006 12:04 PM
I wrote a document on
So... I'm not 100% sure which code they were looking for... but it probably would've been a better scene if someone had said "Hey, I'm looking for X..."
At the very least, we could understand what parts people were interested in.
Posted by: Preed | May 18, 2006 1:32 PM
No, it probably would have been a better scene if Mozilla Corp. had just released the update server code in the first place...
Posted by: Michael Kaply | May 18, 2006 4:41 PM
if Mozilla Corp. had just released the update server code in the first place...
Maybe.
Maybe not.
That decision was made before my time, so I can't speak to why it was made that way.
Posted by: Preed | May 18, 2006 4:44 PM
There seems to be some miscommunication here, so I'll try clear it up.
I do the update service stuff for Flock, both generating the patches, and deploying them on the update server. This is mostly done by hand, save for a couple hacked together shell scripts on top of what's found in tools/update-packaging.
Back in December, I asked Chase where I could find the code to automate all this. He said that he'd have to check with higher ups if that could release be released. Some time later I got an answer: "no".
With that answer I came to the disappointing conclusion that I'd have to implement my own tools to do this. I haven't got to actually starting this however, since the parts of the Flock browser itself that I work on have been higher priority.
You've hinted in this blog post that you're working on releasing this stuff. I'd love to have a firm commitment from Mozilla that it will be released so I don't actually have to wind up reimplementing this.
Posted by: Manish Singh | May 18, 2006 8:39 PM
There seems to be some miscommunication here, so I'll try clear it up.
I appreciate it, Manish.
As I told Michael, I can't speak to the decisions that were made in the past. I don't know the constraints or criteria for that decision.
It's good to get clarification though, because there's a difference between "We couldn't find the code, so we wrote our own," and "We asked, and couldn't get the code, so we wrote our own."
There's been discussion of opening up the code that isn't in the public repository.
Right now, the work to do so often gets pushed below shipping releases. I'm sure you know how this goes. :-)
I'm on vacation for a week after XTech, but when I get back, I'll try to obtain some clarity on the subject. If you don't hear anything by the beginning of June, feel free to email me directly.
Posted by: Preed | May 19, 2006 8:11 AM