Re: Firefox 3.5 release candidate builds: new and exciting!
Gervase Markham
On 20/06/09 09:15, Ken Saunders wrote:
> I've been interested in helping out with testing Mozilla's products
> for a long time and I've started to get my feet wet,
Great :-) mozilla.dev.quality is probably the newsgroup to hang out in;
Moving the conversation there.
> but I'm
> wondering, since betas only advance, and then progress into release
> candidates from nightlies, should I focus my attention and time on
> nightly builds rather than just on betas and release candidates?
> Or am I waaayyy off?
At the moment (and it would be good if someone could say where this is
documented in easy-to-understand fashion) we have the Firefox 3.5
branch, which has produced alphas, betas and release candidates as well
as nightlies, and the trunk, which produces only nightlies. So "nightly"
could refer to a build from either.
> I'm not a coder by nature but I can certainly offer an extra set of
> eyes and run full functional tests on litmus and hopefully, the
> Mozilla Testers Learn As You Go program that I bought on Amazon will
> pay off. :)
:-)
> To show you how green that I am, I always thought that I had to keep
> downloading nightly builds to get the latest. Thanks to this post,
> I've learned about the update channels.
If you are on trunk nightlies, update will give you the latest trunk
nightly. If you are on branch nightlies, you will get the latest branch
nightlies. But if you manually install a beta or RC, you'll just get
future betas/RCs (and final).
At least, I _think_ that's how it works :-)
Gev
Mike Beltzner
> If you are on trunk nightlies, update will give you the latest trunk
> nightly. If you are on branch nightlies, you will get the latest
> branch nightlies. But if you manually install a beta or RC, you'll
> just get future betas/RCs (and final).
>
> At least, I _think_ that's how it works :-)
Almost! :)
There are three update channels:
nightly - updates you every day to the latest nightly build
beta - updates you every time we release a beta milestone
release - the default, updates to official releases
On top of that, the channels are unique per major version. So, someone
on the 3.5 beta channel will receive updates from beta 1 to beta 2,
and once Firefox 3.5 is released, they'll also receive betas of 3.5.1,
3.5.2, etc. However, someone on the 3.0 beta channel will not receive
3.5 betas, as that's a major version jump.
Finally, release candidates are set to use the release channel. So if
you've downloaded the Firefox 3.5 RC you'll be updated to each
subsequent RC, and then to final, and then to final versions of the
security and stability releases (3.5.x) without getting betas.
It's not the easiest soup to see through, but it works!
cheers,
mike