In order to track test results in Litmus, we obviously need to know the build id of the product under test. In the case of Thunderbird or another product, the user is going to need to look it up and enter it manually, but for Firefox, we should be able to auto-detect from the UserAgent it and enter it as a default automatically. The catch is that we can't, at least not yet.
A full Firefox build id is in the form: YYYYMMDDHH. This is the complete id that Litmus needs to accurately match a result with a build. Unfortunately, the build id that appears in both the UserAgent string and the About Dialog is only a shortened form: YYYYMMDD.
Currently, users can either enable codebase_principal_support, which is difficult for casual testers, or go look up the full build id manually, which requires drilling down into the application directory to find the master talkback config file and viewing it with a text editor, even more of a burden for casual testers.
Does anyone know why only the shortened build id is available in the UA string and the About Dialog? It would really be useful for Litmus if the full id were more easily accessible. For testing of Thunderbird and other projects, access to the full build id in the About box would be useful to make it easy for testers to copy and paste it right into Litmus.
Posted by zach at June 12, 2006 11:04 AMhttp://test.bclary.com/bin/buildinfo
Posted by: bc on June 12, 2006 1:44 PMYes, the UA is shortened because back in the dial-up days people were sensitive about the extra bits sent on every request. For any external site the precise hour was two extra bytes of noise.
Personally I think we should have shortened the release UA even more to just the relase version, and put the full build timestamp into a comment field on nightlies only:
Gecko/1.8.1 (2006061205)
Testers get the full info, and millions of people on the web aren't slinging around the useless timestamp. Gets tricky around release time, though, as the candidates would obviously have to have the release formulation, but there might be multiple (now indistinguishable) candidates.
The about page shows the shortened form for no reason other than it just displays the user agent. If you spoof your UA the about page will show the spoof.
Posted by: Dan Veditz on June 12, 2006 2:04 PM