[wpkg-users] wpkg upgrade firefox 3.6 to 4.0.1

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Donny,

On 10.05.2011 20:14, Donny Brooks wrote:
>       I currently am pushing out firefox 3.6 series to my clients via wpkg. We
> have tested firefox 4.0.1 and it seems to work well enough to go live to the end
> users. My question is this: Since they already have the 3.6 series how would I
> go about installing the 4.0.1 without them losing any of their bookmarks and
> such? Would I simply change the firefox.xml script to point to the new 4.0.1
> installer instead of the 3.6 series?

This is exactly the way it works for Firefox 4. Just update your package to use
the Firefox 4 installer. It will upgrade any installed Firefox 3.x to 4.0.

The user profile is anyway not affected by the upgrade itself. But at first
launch Firefox will verify add-on compatibility and ask the user to check for
add-on upgrades potentially deactivating some incompatible extensions.


There is one more thing you should potentially take into account. Firefox 4
seems to have changed the way the uninstall entry appears in the control panel.
So you need to update your checks.

As the uninstall entry now has the format "Mozilla Firefox <version> (<arch>
<language>)" the entries might look like:
Mozilla Firefox 4.0.1 (x86 en-US)
or
Mozilla Firefox 4.0.1 (x86 de-DE)

So you either have to use logical OR checks to verify all possible entries on
our systems or you might chose to use a regular expression. That's actually the
way I did it. My check now looks as follows:

<check type='uninstall' condition='exists' path='Mozilla Firefox 4\.0\.1 .*' />

This will yield true for all Firefox 4.0.1 versions and language editions.

On some installations where users have administrator privileges I've even chosen
to use
<check type='uninstall' condition='exists' path='Mozilla Firefox 4\.0.*' />

This allows any Firefox 4.0.x to be installed. So even if users manually upgrade
to Firefox 4.0.2 without waiting for official WPKG release then WPKG will not
complain about missing Firefox (which would actually make WPKG re-installing it
and effectively performing a downgrade). This way I allow such users to perform
upgrades within the 4.0.x branch - but still disallowing upgrading to Firefox 5.
Sure you can relax this policy even more by adapting the regular expression to
your needs.

br,
Rainer