Ben Hearsum (Posts about b2g)

Improvements to updates for Foxfooders

Ben Hearsum — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 18:07:40 GMT

We've been providing on-device updates (that is to say: no flashing required) to users in the Foxfood program for nearly 6 months now. These updates are intended for users who are officially part of the Foxfooding program, but the way our update system works means that anyone who puts themselves on the right update channel can receive them. This makes things tough for us, because we'd like to be able to provide official Foxfooders with some extra bits and we can't do that while these populations are on the same update channel. Thanks to work that Rob Wood and Alexandre Lissy are doing, we'll soon be able to resolve this and get Foxfooders the bits they need to do the best possible testing.

To make this possible, we've implemented a short term solution that lets us only serve updates to official Foxfooders. When landed, they will send a hashed version of their IMEI as part of their update request. A list of the acceptable IMEI hashes will be maintained in Balrog (the update server), which lets us only serve an update if the incoming one matches one of the whitelisted ones.

To really make this work we need to detangle the current "dogfood" update channel. As I mentioned, it's currently being used in two distinct populations of users: those are part of the official program, and those who aren't. In order to support both populations of users we'll be splitting the "dogfood" update channel into two:

The new "foxfood" channel will be for users who are officially part of the Foxfooding program. Users on this channel will be part of the IMEI whitelist, and could receive FOTA or OTA updates.
The "dogfood" channel will continue to serve serve OTA updates to anyone who puts themself on it.

To transition, we will be asking folks who are officially part of the Foxfooding program to flash with a new image that switches them to the "foxfood" update channel. When this is ready to go, it will be announced and communicated appropriately.

Big thanks to everyone who was involved in this effort, particularly Rob Wood, who implemented the new whitelisting feature in Balrog, and Alexandre Lissy and Jean Gong, who went through multiple rounds of back and forth before we settled on this solution.

It's worth noting that this solution isn't ideal: sending IMEIs (even hashed versions) isn't something we prefer to do for both reasons of user privacy and protection of the bits. In the longer term, we'd like to look at a solution that wouldn't require IMEIs to be sent to us. This could come in the form of embedding or asking for credentials, and using those to access the updates. This type of solution would enhance user privacy and make it harder to get around the protections by brute forcing.

B2G builds with multilocale Gaia now available (attention localizers!)

Ben Hearsum — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:13:37 GMT

As I mentioned last week, we've been working hard to get multilocale B2G builds going. This morning we flipped the switch and turned on multilocale Gaia across the board. The existing desktop and device builds on TBPL will now include a Gaia profile with Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Mandarin Chinese (zh-TW). Additionally, we now have new desktop builds with all of the locales listed in this file available -- meaning that most people localizing B2G can now test their translations in-app. These are available for Linux, Mac, and Windows in the "localizer" packages in this directory. A few notes:

Linux users who have run a B2G desktop build in the past may need to rm -rf ~/.mozilla/b2g before these new builds will function correctly.
Gecko is still en-US only. Expect network errors and other such things to be in en-US for now. Multilocale gecko for B2G work is being tracked in bug 817197 and the bugs that it blocks.
All of the desktop builds will be updated on a nightly basis. However, there are no automatic updates for them - you must download by hand whenever you want to test newer code or translations.

Upcoming l10n changes to B2G device and desktop builds

Ben Hearsum — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:53:30 GMT

Currently, all of the b2g builds on TBPL are using a fixed set of locales which are built into the Gaia repository. These were OK at first, but we're at the point now where we need to be able to test the languages that we'll be initially shipping, as well as provide some way for localizers to test out their work. For these reasons, the following changes will be made to the B2g desktop and device builds: * Unagi, otoro, panda, and the current desktop b2g builds will include 6 locales (instead of the 4 they currently do): Arabic (ar), English (en-US), French (fr), Spanish (es), Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR), and Mandarin Chinese (zh-TW). These builds are intended for developer consumption and help to test out a wide array of features (rtl languages, languages with long strings, unicode characters, etc). * We will be adding new desktop b2g builds that contain all languages that Gaia is available in (see https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/shared/resources/languages-all.json for the full list). These builds are intended for localizers to see how their translations look and feel. These changes should be taking place sometime this week. Big thanks to Staś Małolepszy for adding support for this to the Gaia build system. Note that for now, the Gecko portions (for example, network error pages in the Browser) will not be localized. We will be enabling localization for Gecko as soon as we can, but it's not quite ready yet.

B2G Desktop builds now (mostly) available

Ben Hearsum — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 19:21:53 GMT

Hot on the heels of the Armv7a Gingerbread builds for B2G, we now have Mac and Windows Desktop builds of B2G+Gecko available for download. On TBPL, they show up as "Ng" cells in the existing OS X64 opt and Win opt rows, and you can download the builds from FTP in the nightly directories. Please note that these are NOT full B2G builds. These are developer-targeted builds which only run on desktop machines, and cannot be flashed onto a phone or tablet. These builds are primarily useful to developers, QA and localizers working on Gaia. They can also be used by anyone who wishes to test out their websites or apps through a B2G-like client.. Linux versions of these builds are in the works, and will be available as soon as we fix an infrastructure issue preventing them from successfully building. We hope to have it fixed by the end of the week. Enjoy! Edit: If you're confused about what to do with these builds even after they're running have a read over https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Hacking and https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Hacking.

Armv7a Gingerbread Gecko builds (opt+debug) now enabled on project branches

Ben Hearsum — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:48:26 GMT

Just a quick announcement that a couple of follow-up bugs to the work from landed:

bug 767503 added the new-style Armv7a GB-based Gecko builds to project branches
bug 767528 disabled the old, now-superfluous opt builds

All active project branches have had these builds enabled except for the elm and oak twigs. If you are the owner of a project branch and do not wish to have B2G builds on it, or do not feel they will be useful please file a RelEng bug to have them disabled. Do keep in mind that burning these builds when pushing to mozilla-central or mozilla-inbound will get you backed out.

Armv7a Gingerbread-based B2G Gecko debug builds now live

Ben Hearsum — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:19:58 GMT

A few weeks ago armv7a Gingerbread-based B2G Gecko *opt* builds started running on most branches. As of a few hours ago we are now generating debug versions of these builds. We now have "Armv7a GB" rows for opt and debug with "Bg" (B2G Gecko Build) cells in them, and we'll add more build & test cells and platform rows as they arrive. We know there's more B2G build requests coming, so as part of this, we also reworked our configs to make it easier to add additional B2G platforms and build types in the future. For now, we've left the original "B2G" builds listed in the "Linux" row on TBPL. These are the initial opt builds that were set-up, and are exactly the same as the new Bg builds in the "Armv7a GB opt" row. This is transitional only - we'll be running them in parallel over the weekend and shutting the old builds off early next week after we're satisfied with the new ones. For more details see bug 758425.