Fenix: FNX-514 ⁃ [discussion] Use explicit android-components versions instead of snapshots

[mitchhentges]

How often do android-components snapshots releases land without breaking changes?
If it's the majority of the time, then we currently have the following workflow

1. Release a-c snapshot with breaking changes
2. Snapshot slowly begins being used by CI and each Fenix developer, causing failing builds
3. A PR is created and landed to address the breakage

Unfortunately, between steps 1 and 3, Fenix builds will sporadically begin to fail, harming productivity.

Perhaps we should change the workflow to:

1. Release a-c version with breaking changes
2. The new version doesn't affect developers (they have stale a-c code)
3. A PR is created to use the new version and handle breakage, if any

This way, developers/releng don't have their builds unexpectedly start failing. When I was working to prepare the Fenix Beta pipeline last Thursday, I was blocked for hours due to a snapshot release that didn't need to affect my work.

TL;DR: How much time are we saving by not needing to manually bump the a-c version? How much time are we losing to snapshot breakage?

@pocmo

[pocmo]

This is planned to happen close to / at the Fenix release. Currently we want to get the AC changes into Fenix as soon as possible and there are Fenix-related patches landing all the time.

[kbrosnan]

We seem to be doing this for releases. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/commit/1d57e77ceaa862e54ffeba83a480ed35cc1295dd is there anything else to do in this issue?

[mitchhentges]

It looks like we're still using snapshots, so this ticket can't be closed yet

[kbrosnan]

We are using pinned versions for the release builds and snapshots for the master builds.

[mitchhentges]

As in, dynamically? Is gradle pulling a different dependency (snapshot vs pin) based on the build type? Or are you overwriting mozilla_android_components before each release, then putting it back to ...-SNAPSHOT after?

[pocmo]

Or are you overwriting mozilla_android_components before each release, then putting it back to ...-SNAPSHOT after?

That's probably going to happen.

That said, this was an ad-hoc decision (switching from 1.0.0 to 2.0.0-SNAPSHOT) to continue working with bleeding edge fixes/features in AC in Fenix. This is related to our development/release flow that is not really finalized.

[ekager]

We have continued to release with a pinned version, and then go back to snapshots. Can we close this ticket?

[pocmo]

Yeah, I think the current process is working fairly well, right?

Eventually I would like to look into "pinned snapshots" to automatically update the version but also have it pinned so that it does not randomly break. But that's something for a different issue.

[vesta0]

@pocmo @liuche can we close this?