On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 1:45 PM, Georg Koppen gk@torproject.org wrote:
I am not convinced we should do that for all of our platforms we support at this point. Here is an alternative plan. For me the main reason to switch to builds based on mozilla-release at the moment is the mobile Firefox not getting security updates on the ESR branch. As we are working on our mobile Tor Browser anyway it seems to me to be quite natural to test this idea for just platform alone. That could be part of a normal alpha workflow: understanding what we need on the release engineer, the patch work, the review side etc. to make this a smooth stable experience at the end.
This I think would mean we won't switch during the ESR 59 cycle to this new model for our desktop Tor Browser which seems worthwhile both stability- and reliability-wise. We can then reconsider this once preparations for ESR 66 are about to start. If we think the experiences we made and the lessons we learnt during the experiment with the mobile Tor Browser are sufficient for us to swicth away from ESR 52 on all platforms, then let's do it. If not then let's stay on ESR.
That longer timeframe would allow us as well to get the remaining patches landed that we think are necessary to switch to a non-ESR cycle. The proxy bypass framework (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1314793) comes to mind, for instance.
I like this suggestion a lot. Testing with mobile first and waiting for ESR66 to decide on desktop makes a lot of sense to me. So I will go ahead with setting up a nightly rebase and we can integrate it with the mobile processes as needed.