What’s happening to UMO

The Mozilla Update service (a.k.a UMO) has been frozen for close to a month now for various reasons. We would like to take this opportunity to bring folks up to speed on where it is going and when it will get there.

Just a few weeks ago, the lead developer stepped down and so the Mozilla Foundation has taken the chance to re-evaluate the project and look at how to best move it forward. Looking over the existing v1.0 codebase, the remaining developers felt there were security concerns and scalability issues with the site that needed to be addressed. At this time, the site and CVS for updates to the UMO codebase are frozen.

However, the community awaits and we really want to get the the site back on-line so we can continue the momentum that the release of Firefox 1.0 has created. To that end, we are moving quickly to do the following:

• Next week we will be launching a security audit of the existing UMO code. The goal is to get the UMO site back to a known state so that we can feel comfortable with pushing out updates to end-users.
• Starting next week, we are going to start processing the pending requests in the UMO queue. We want to do updates for existing extension/theme developers via the UMO site admins.
• Upon completion of the security audit we will be starting to work up requirements for UMO v2.0 which will be a complete rewrite and will allow us to usethings like database abstraction and templating.
• To help scale the site, we have decoupled the services from one URL (http://update.mozilla.org) to several: http://aus.mozilla.org (Application Update Service) , http://pfs.mozilla.org (Plugin Finder Service) and http://addons.mozilla.org (Addons section with extensions/themes). This will allow us to upgrade the busiest parts of the site in the most cost effective manner.

The biggest concern right now is that we don’t know what we’re dealing with. Once we know what we have and have completed the security audit, we will turn the site back on in its existing state (with several bugs fixed). In the mean time, please bear with us as we hand audit each pending request and get the site back rolling (as slow as that may be).

We’re working hard to get UMO going again and we want to be sure to include everyone in our discussions.