Devedition is moving to be a repack. One issue that's come up is dealing with the special devedition default profile. One idea was to allow this to be set in a repack. See bug 1354262. This bug is for another idea, which is to remove the devedition special cases and instead have a separate default profile for each update channel.

First draft patch. This works ok in initial testing but I haven't pressed very hard. It's not clear whether this is all that is needed, either. Bryan said some things about possibly migrating an existing profile somehow; and there is: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/45692c884fdd5136a64fb2f8a61a0c8183b69331/browser/app/profile/firefox.js#1375 https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/45692c884fdd5136a64fb2f8a61a0c8183b69331/browser/components/nsBrowserGlue.js#1046 and some code in browser/components/preferences/in-content/main.js. Finally, a QA plan is needed.

Partner builds have unique channels (not release), so I think they would get caught up in this code. The way it works is we send the channel to the server and it since it doesn't exist, it gets defaulted to release. I'll get some more details so you can test this by putting a channel into distribution.ini.

Please be careful: partner builds appear to have a unique channel when checking for updates, but in terms of gecko/telemetry/etc the channel is still "release" and the distribution ID is recorded separately. that is, UpdateUtils.getUpdateChannel(false) will return "release" for all builds no matter the partner. UpdateUtils.getUpdateChannel(true) will return "release" for a consumer release and "release-cck-<partner>" for a partner build.

Tom, I'd really like a product specification of how this is supposed to work, both for users and QA. e.g. what do existing users do, how does this interact with profile reset, etc. Who's in charge of writing that all down?

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg [:bsmedberg] from comment #5) > Tom, I'd really like a product specification of how this is supposed to > work, both for users and QA. e.g. what do existing users do, how does this > interact with profile reset, etc. Who's in charge of writing that all down? I need that too. I think Bryan Clark is the person.

After some discussion it seems we'll be going the repack route for devedition, so I'm closing this bug.