ChatZilla on XULRunner Updates

Starting with 0.9.74, my ChatZilla packages support the same software update system as Firefox and Thunderbird.

The following cases are blocked and won't receive updates:

Trunk builds, because they're broken as usual.
Branch (1.8.0 and 1.8.1) builds older than 20060617, because a bug means updates just didn't apply. This includes current stable XULRunner releases.
Mac OS X, because:
- The updater behaves in a different way on Mac meaning I need to start producing Mac-specific packages.
- A bug means stuff breaks when updates are applied.
- I don't have access to a Mac to test on.

The check for updates occurs once a day - the /update command can be used to trigger a manual check. Updates will always prompt before download or install.

There are three update channels, based on the colour system that all ChatZilla releases follow:

green for stable versions that (excluding my changes) have been reviewed and checked in to mozilla.org CVS.
yellow for version that contain changes outside of CVS, but are still considered mostly stable.
red for development builds or release versions that contain major changes likely to cause problems.

The channel setting defaults to yellow and is kept in the channel-prefs.js file.

When I want to build an update-enabled ChatZilla, I run "UPDATE_CHANNEL=red ./makexpi.sh". This causes makexpi.sh with my patch applied to run:

../../../tools/update-packaging/make_full_update.sh chatzilla-$VERSION-$BUILDID.mar xr-tree

The script used is from mozilla/tools/update-packaging, in mozilla.org CVS and requires mar.exe (or equivalent on other platforms). If you don't feel like building it yourself, there's a Windows binary here.

ChatZilla on XULRunner Updates

Technical Notes