Release inconsistency

[aptalca]

Does this feature already exist in Firefox Stable?

I'm not sure

Does this feature already exist in Firefox ESR?

I don't know

Feature description

Hi,

We use automation to grab the latest version and artifacts from Github releases here. Unfortunately the latest release 14.0.8 breaks our automation as it is an OS specific partial release and is missing linux artifacts.

Could you please consider marking partial or OS specific releases not as latest on Github? They could be marked as prerelease. That way downstream automation will not treat it as the latest full/proper release.

Thanks

Alternatives considered

We would have to update our ci to allow us to manually ignore releases, which defeats the purpose of automation

Is this related to a problem?

The latest marked release on Github should ideally be a full/proper release.

[ruihildt]

It would not be proper to not set this as the latest release, because it's definitely the latest release and an emergency security one. So setting it as pre-release would not send the right message.

I can see more options moving forward:

• adding alongside the current windows release, the files from the previous release for other platforms
• instead of consuming the updates from Github, using another channel

What do you think?

[aptalca]

It would not be proper to not set this as the latest release, because it's definitely the latest release and an emergency security one. So setting it as pre-release would not send the right message.

Thanks for the response. That's a good point.

In that case, I think the ideal solution would be to make it a full release instead for all platforms, with all artifacts included. With that, you could either bump all platform versions to 14.0.8 and note in the release notes that there were no changes in linux and macos, or you could copy the unchanged artifacts from the previous release (which may cause confusion due to the mismatch in release tag and the version in the artifact filename). In my opinion either option would be better than a partial release as latest.

With regards to another channel, do you have a recommendation? Is there a json feed available? We would really prefer not to try and scrape the website for the latest release info but that's the only other place we are currently aware of. I also noticed the website still lists 14.0.7 as latest for Windows so maybe that's not automated or perhaps delayed.

Thanks

[ruihildt]

For our own website, we are actually using a .jsonfile which will be deprecated. (including for the reason you underlined: it doesn't play well with having different versions for the browser at the same time)

We have platform specific .json that you'll be able to use, but I'm going to check first if we can futureproof.
I'll keep you updated here.

(in the meantime, everything will go back to normal with 14.0.9 planned for next week.)