Moving some old builds from Mozilla's FTP server to an offline archive

[Ben Hearsum]

(Cross posting widely, please reply to mozilla.dev.builds)

Hi Everyone,

Over the course of the past few years we've greatly increased the number
of builds and other files we push to Mozilla's FTP server. Despite
having a vast amount of space available we've nearly filled it up. We'd
like to recover quite a bit of space in one shot by archiving all
Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey builds from 2006 and earlier to an
offline backup.

For Firefox, this means is:
* up to 1.5.0.10pre nightlies on the 1.8.0 branch
* up to 2.0.0.2pre nightlies on the Mozilla 1.8 branch
* up to 3.0a2pre on the 1.9 branch.

Both 1.5.0.x and 2.0.0.x are de-supported at this point, so I don't
expect anybody needs them. I also don't expect anyone needs 3.0a2pre builds.

For Thunderbird, this is:
* up to 1.5.0.10pre nightlies on the 1.8.0 branch
* up to 2.0b1pre nightlies on the 1.8 branch
* up to 3.0a1pre nightlies on the 1.9 branch.

1.5.0.x is de-supported at this point for Thunderbird, and 2.0b1pre and
3.0a1pre are pretty ancient and I suspect no one looks at this regularly.

For SeaMonkey, this is:
* 1.0.7pre nightlies on the 1.8.0 branch
* 1.1pre nightlies on the 1.8 branch
* 1.5a1pre nightlies on the 1.9.0 branch
1.0.x is unsupported at this point for SeaMonkey, and both 1.1pre and
1.5a1pre are very ancient, and as with Thunderbird, I suspect they
aren't often looked at.

Note that this is only nightly builds we're talking about - releases
(including alphas and betas) will remain on FTP.

Does anyone have a practical use for builds on a regular basis? Are
there other strong objections to this?

Note that if we do need to retrieve older builds for some reason they
can be put online again (temporarily) by filing an IT bug.

I'll give folks a day or two to respond to this before we go ahead with it.

- Ben

[Ben Hearsum]

(Crossposting again, please reply to mozilla.dev.builds)

Aravind kindly granted me access to the FTP logs so we can get some
better data. Here's what I've come up with:
BUILD YEAR || PRODUCT || NUMBER OF DOWNLOADS IN 2009
2004 firefox 310
2005 firefox 594
2006 firefox 921
2004 thunderbird 9
2005 thunderbird 178
2006 thunderbird 245
2005 seamonkey 6
2006 seamonkey 19
2006 calendar 107

So for example, in this current calendar year there have been 310
downloads of a Firefox build (defined as .zip, .exe, .tar.gz, or .dmg)
from 2004.

I can go back in time further if people like, too, but I think 6 months
of history is probably a large enough data set.

--

Only Firefox builds from 2005 and 2006 are averaging more than 2 hits
per day and given that I'd like to humbly suggest that we archive the
following:
* Firefox nightly builds from 2004
* Thunderbird nightly builds from 2004, 2005, and 2006
* SeaMonkey nightly builds from 2005 and 2006
* Calendar nightly builds from 2005 and 2006

This would let us keep *all* Firefox nightlies from 1.5.0.x and 2.0.0.x
- bz/phil/others, does that make things better for you in terms of
regression hunting?

Does this sound fairer to everyone?

As an aside, IT is currently looking into pricing and the possibility of
adding more space to this storage array. More on that when I hear back.

- Ben