Update on the updates situation

Hi,

I’ve taken some time to try to fix the update situation and have come across a clash between the old update (for lack of a better word) necessities to the new update necessities.

In the past, we had partial and complete mar files in the release’s update paths without checksums and these mar files are served by Mozilla’s bouncer (somewhat like a load-balancer or somesuch thing which I never really understood).  The checksums were provided in the snippet directory when the updates were generated in the forms of ‘complete.txt’ and ‘partial.txt’.

I’ve tested out our update server with one version.  2.29.  The client *can* grab the update to 2.53.1 *but* it can’t update to it. (Restart produces the dialog that the update couldn’t be applied).  I didn’t check why it didn’t work; but I suspect that the update format for 2.53.1 isn’t ‘compatible’ to 2.29’s update code.

So all in all, the update backend and process is a complete mess.  While I can dedicate some time to figuring out this mess (I can’t right now, as I’m in the process of getting 2.53.2 uploaded), I will take some time before the backend can get to the point of ‘working’; though I suspect it’s going to be at a cost of not supporting versions (i.e. 1.x or 2.0.x and possibly others).

It is a mess… *sigh*

:ewong

 

 

About ewong

I'm a SeaMonkey dev/RelEnger and a bit of a buildbot dev.
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3 Responses to Update on the updates situation

  1. Ricardo Palomares says:

    Perhaps you could try an incremental approach, so the automatic updates work from 2.53.1 on. Once that works, the majority of SM users will benefit from partial updates and, equally important, automatic notifications of new versions.

    While I don’t know the distribution of versions used by active SM users, I guess getting people on 2.49.5 to be able to update automatically would cover most active users nowadays. Spending more time to cover less than 5 % of our active user base seems wasting your valuable time.

    As always, a big THANK YOU for your relentless work.

  2. Martin says:

    I think noones cares about 1.0 or 2.0 anyway. You only need to fetch the users who got the last automatic update and are stuck there.

  3. Don Paul says:

    The new release speeds up after a PC reboot on Windows 10, but quickly slows to a crawl. Previous release also had this problem, with no fix from 2.53.3. All my other browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge) work at normal high speed with my Dell i7 high end desktop, fully and regularly maintained. Sea Monkey has been my favorite browser for years, and has all of my favorite bookmarks. What could be causing this persistent problem on an otherwise fast PC with good internet speed test results?

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