[tbb-dev] Nightly rebase experiment proposal

[Arthur D. Edelstein]

On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 1:45 PM, Georg Koppen <gk at 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.