Approximately every six to eight weeks Mozilla usually releases a patch containing bug fixes and possible security patches. Emergency patches may require a shorter cycle. Since Flock is built on Mozilla's code base it is important that these patches get incorporated into Flock as well. Our goal is to release a tested patch for Flock within one week available on the website and as an automatic upgrade.
In general we like to be cautious with regards to rolling out patches (depending on its contents and criticality). This way, in the unlikely occurrence of a new major bug being introduced, we can limit how many users are affected. We follow a few basic steps:
- After a QA is complete we make the patch available as a release candidate for anyone to download.
- After a few days of exposure and within 48 hours of Mozilla making the patch available for Firefox we we place the updated version of Flock (bumping the version number) as the downloadable version on the website.
- After another day or so of exposure and if there are no serious issues reported, we make the patch available for automatic updates for a few hours. A percentage of users will get an alert announcing that there is an update available.
- Again, if no issues are reported, after another day or so we'll turn on the automatic updates permanently.
