Development channel version number upgrade rules

I am not sure how upgrade rules work for the development channel given https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/AMO/Policy/Maintenance, as it only addresses the change in a major version. However I assume the “version” is derived from lexical sorting for the additional string, meaning “a1” gets upgraded to “a2” or “b1”, but not to “a10”.

https://developer.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Distribution#Beta_versions says:

if you upload 1.0beta1 to the release channel and then upload 1.1alpha1, all users of 1.0beta1 will be offered an upgrade to 1.1alpha1.
Updates are pushed by submission date and not version number, so users
will always get the most recent channel update regardless of any kind of
alphabetical sorting.

Hmm, that’s generally not what I’ve been seeing how the auto update behaves. I had a commit hash in the semver format (+hash) in there for two versions and it would never auto update to that version, but it would then update when I uploaded a strictly “bigger” version. I am also seeing that most users are stranded on pre9 right now and only my personal installations, which I manually upgraded are on pre11. Though this is hard to test, since auto update claims to have no updates in my tests, regardless of the pre version.

Hmm, I just remembered that I’ve read the above somewhere and looked it up. Personally I never got past 4 consecutive dev releases yet.
From what you said I guess after your ‘pre’ you will have to ship something like ‘beta01’ then (Zero padding should be allowed (/(a|alpha|b|beta|pre|rc)\d*$/).)

Yes, though it’s too late for that. I guess the best way out is to go to prf01 :wink: (which won’t work for the record)

Oh, sorry, got the alphabet the wrong way around -.-
But can’t you jump from pre9 to rc01 or rc1 (in lexical ascending order)?

Yeah, that one would work. I’ll have to try it, I guess.
Edit: pushed an update with rc01. Will look at the stats in two days if I remember it and post an update. Auto update worked on my installations though, which is a good sign.

See also Two bugs in Development Channel - Add-ons / addons.mozilla.org - Mozilla Discourse

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So yeah, the rc01 has been auto updated to. The documentation on how the updating works really needs fixing.

Sorry for bumping an old thread, but I just found https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Toolkit_version_format via WebExtension version docs. And according to this the number after pre/a/b or whatever would be accounted as part of the string when using semver, since it only looks for three numbers. This explains why the sorting is ascii based for semver pre-releases.