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Firefox moving to 4 week releases

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Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#161

Post by chrisseaton »

uranusjr wrote: post #157
chrisseaton wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must already be doing a full build, test, and benchmark for each platform for each PR to their codebase in CI, presumably in parallel to make it run reasonably fast. It doesn’t seem like much of an extra step to release those binaries they’re already building hundreds of times a day.

They already do that with Firefox Nightly. But most users expect a more stable product than that.

How can it be more stable than a build that passes CI? If they have some extra tests to run to check it’s stable why aren’t those in CI?

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#162

Post by brennebeck »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #154
kingofpandora wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of the various Linux distributions just repackage those binaries. Source please. Never mind, it's simply wrong so don't even worry about it!

Gentoo does it for firefox-bin: /usr/portage/www-client/firefox-bin/firefox-bin-69.0.ebuild MOZ_HTTP_URI="https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/${MOZ_PN}/releases/" ... SRC_URI="${SRC_URI} amd64? ( ${MOZ_HTTP_URI%/}/${MOZ_PV}/linux-x86_64/en-US/${MOZ_P}.tar.bz2 -> ${PN}_x86_64-${PV}.tar.bz2 ) x86? ( ${MOZ_HTTP_URI%/}/${MOZ_PV}/linux-i686/en-US/${MOZ_P}.tar.bz2 -> ${PN}_i686-${PV}.tar.bz2 )"

Doesn’t gentoo essentially do that for (most?) everything?

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#163

Post by fetbaffe »

jaas wrote: post #59
kenhwang wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox probably had bad memories of when they "released when it's ready" during the FF3 -> FF4 days where a couple of features held back everything. With fix released cycles, they have more of a motivator to cut off things that aren't ready yet so that the things that are can go out.

"probably had bad memories" Speaking as someone who was at Mozilla at that time, you can change "probably had" to "definitely has". In hindsight I'd go ahead and call it a disaster. The X weeks release cadence solves so many problems.

Remember back then when enterprises certified their entire install base against FF3, but then FF4 came out & they needed to redo all the enterprise certification bullshit.

zach_galifianakis_laugh.mp4

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#164

Post by pingyong »

chrisseaton wrote: post #161
uranusjr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do that with Firefox Nightly. But most users expect a more stable product than that.

How can it be more stable than a build that passes CI? If they have some extra tests to run to check it’s stable why aren’t those in CI?

It can be more stable by having nightly users test it beforehand for a while and report any new bugs.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#165

Post by pingyong »

iagooar wrote: post #102

Wrong decision. Nobody wants to update their browser this frequently, and the release overhead is a constant factor. So you're basically having a lot less productive time where you actually produce value. But hey, not my call I guess.

>Nobody wants to update their browser this frequently

Uhh really? Pretty sure "most people" don't even notice when their browser updates.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#166

Post by chrisseaton »

pingyong wrote: post #164
chrisseaton wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it be more stable than a build that passes CI? If they have some extra tests to run to check it’s stable why aren’t those in CI?

It can be more stable by having nightly users test it beforehand for a while and report any new bugs.

What are those users doing that can’t be automated and run in CI?

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#167

Post by Grue3 »

pingyong wrote: post #165
iagooar wrote: post #102

Wrong decision. Nobody wants to update their browser this frequently, and the release overhead is a constant factor. So you're basically having a lot less productive time where you actually produce value. But hey, not my call I guess.

>Nobody wants to update their browser this frequently Uhh really? Pretty sure "most people" don't even notice when their browser updates.

I almost never restart Firefox, and having a pop-up nagging me to update sucks a lot. Sometimes I have to look at it for many weeks straight before Firefox eventually eats all the RAM and I have to restart it.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#168

Post by chopin »

chrisseaton wrote: post #166
pingyong wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be more stable by having nightly users test it beforehand for a while and report any new bugs.

What are those users doing that can’t be automated and run in CI?

Test on exotic hardware, for example. Or exotic combinations of libraries in the OS which FF depends on.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#169

Post by moviuro »

brennebeck wrote: post #162
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gentoo does it for firefox-bin: /usr/portage/www-client/firefox-bin/firefox-bin-69.0.ebuild MOZ_HTTP_URI="https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/${MOZ_PN}/releases/" ... SRC_URI="${SRC_URI} amd64? ( ${MOZ_HTTP_URI%/}/${MOZ_PV}/linux-x86_64/en-US/${MOZ_P}.tar.bz2 -> ${PN}_x86_64-${PV}.tar.bz2 ) x86? ( ${MOZ_HTTP_URI%/}/${MOZ_PV}/linux-i686/en-US/${MOZ_P}.tar.bz2 -> ${PN}_i686-${PV}.tar.bz2 )"

Doesn’t gentoo essentially do that for (most?) everything?

Only massive packages (firefox, chromium, KDE, Gnome, etc.). The entire promise of gentoo is the opposite: fine-tuning and local ~~heater~~ compilation.

Re: Firefox moving to 4 week releases

#170

Post by sha666sum »

aquabeagle wrote: post #62
fluffything wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox ships ~100 binaries for 100 different targets, from mobile phones, to desktops, tablets, ... x86, arm, sparc, ppc, riscv, ... X linux, windows, macos, freebds, openbsd, netbsd, .... X arch linux, debian, ubuntu .. At some point you need to say this is what we want to ship, and branch, and make sure that not only all tests pass, but that the installers work, run the benchmark suite that might not be run on eve…

Mozilla only provides binaries for Linux 32-bit, Linux 64-bit, macOS, win32, and win64: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/69.0/ All of the various Linux distributions just repackage those binaries. iOS and Android are distributed only through the App Store and Google Play. The BSDs and other ("tier 3") platforms have to compile from source and distribute their own packages: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-…

Although this comment was already debunked, I'll add Arch's Firefox PKGBUILD here [1].

And to save you a click, they compile it from a source tarball.

[1] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/P...

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