Firefox:1.5 Software Update Upgrades

• Make In-Place Update work reliably
• Other Low opportunity-cost updates to SW/Update
• Chase says:
  • Rollback of updates.
  • Drop in the new installation's files, then "hand off" control of the installation to a new entry point (where the chance of canceling that operation is extremely low). Avoid completely the possibility that canceling a large file copy can hork the installation.
  • Nightly and stable update channels. Plan for extending this to allow these sorts of channels for installed extensions, as well.
  • Cross-integration with build system and build registration. Build registration doesn't exist yet, but it's being thought about and discussed, we should plan for when it exists so the client is there, too.
  • Make this work on the core platforms equally well.
    • Mac XPIfication needs to happen.
  • More expressive patch distribution in the RDF format. Model real-world scenarios:
    • An update is only available on Windows.
    • Two patches need to be applied simultaneously, then a third patch needs to be applied specifically after that.
    • Platform and architecture-independent patches
    • If not platform or architecture-independent patches, handle these cases gracefully.
      • The update is applicable to Linux i[56]86 but not Linux i386.
      • There's an update for Linux ia64 -- or, supporting a mechanism for showing that Linux ia64 is explicitly NOT supported.
        • And then in 2.0 if we suddenly support Linux ia64 showing that 1.5 wasn't supported but 2.0 is.
    • We didn't anticipate some case but need to be able to handle it. Update the nsUpdateService.js script (update the updater) so that it can handle the new case as well.
    • No kidding — we really have run into these cases and should be able to handle them better!

Software Update:User Interface Software Update:Checking For Updates

Software Update Service: Identify + Implement = 5d XPInstall Back End: ???d