[tor-bugs] #17662 [Quality Assurance and Testing]: Have a test to check that Tor Browser updater is working

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#17662: Have a test to check that Tor Browser updater is working
------------------------------------------------+-----------------------
 Reporter:  boklm                               |          Owner:  boklm
     Type:  task                                |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium                              |      Milestone:
Component:  Quality Assurance and Testing       |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal                              |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  tbb-testcase, TorBrowserTeam201512  |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                                      |         Points:
  Sponsor:                                      |
------------------------------------------------+-----------------------

Comment (by boklm):

 Replying to [comment:1 mcs]:
 > An update to the same version should work. But then you would need to
 always build with the same version (so you could use a pre-signed MAR file
 that has that version embedded in it).

 This might work for testing the updater in nightly builds where we always
 use the same version. But for release builds it is more difficult as it
 requires a full rebuild to change the version number.

 >
 > I think Mozilla avoids these problems by creating nightly or test builds
 with different signing certs in them and also a different value for
 ACCEPTED_MAR_CHANNEL_IDS inside browser/confvars.sh. If we only need to
 test with nightly builds that we do not expect regular users to ever use,
 we could adopt that kind of approach. Then both incremental and full
 updates could be tested because the tests could generate signed MAR files.

 Interesting. I see that the marionette tests have an option '--update-
 allow-mar-channel':
 https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ui-tests/blob/mozilla-
 central/firefox_ui_harness/arguments/update.py#L11

 So it looks like the accepted mar channels can be changed at run time, but
 I'm not sure what this refers to exactly. Do you know if this could allow
 us to change at run time the certificate used to verify the update?

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17662#comment:3>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online