Re: Mozilla downloads don't use stub - a hint?

[Sean Su]

Daniel Veditz wrote: Rob Brandt wrote: I noticed this week when I went to the Mozilla.org home page that the download links for the Windows platform were to the whole package, not the 200k (or so) stub installer. Can anyone comment as to why this is? Is this a hint that development/support of the stub installer is history? I noticed this too. Asa said it was because of the way AOL hosted ftp.mozilla.org on their server farm -- occassionally the rotation would include an ftp server that didn't actually have the Mozilla content which made the component download appear unreliable to many people. Hm, now that I think about it I believe the stub downloader uses a single connection to get all the components so I'm not sure his explaination makes sense, or maybe I misunderstood the problem. I'll look into it. well... "sorta".  There's bug in libxpnet I found in our FTP protocol implementation that for each file request, it will also re-request a new data port for the file to be sent from/to.  It does not close and open a new connection (this part was fixed a while back) for each file. This might have been the cause of the problem, however, we are defaulting to using HTTP now.  HTTP should be downloading all files in 1 connection without any renegotiating for ports between files (as it's a much simpler protocol). We should talk to Asa to see when these problem were occurring and see if the installer was still using FTP as the default download protocol. In any case I'm not sure what the future brings. The Mozilla Organization will be transitioning to its own servers in the near future and they're a bit worried about the normal milestone bandwidth requirements. The combined packages will be easier to mirror which might encourage preference for that mechanism. The future is supposed to be independent applications like Mozilla Firebird, and none of those have any installer yet. -Dan Veditz