Software Update:Manually Installing a MAR file

Overview

This document explains how to manually apply a MAR file to an existing Firefox installation to update it. This is useful in case you wish to patch Firefox without running Firefox itself.

Example

Assuming that you have a 2005-09-20-05 1.8-branch build of Firefox for Linux installed on your system, download firefox-1.4.en-US.linux-i686.partial.2005092005-2005092105.mar and rename it update.mar.

Make a working directory for the updater alongside your copy of Firefox. For example, on my system I have Firefox installed in a directory named firefox, and I've created a working directory alongside it called firefox-update. Place update.mar into the firefox-update directory and copy firefox/updater into this directory as well. Then run the following command to update your copy of Firefox:

$ cd firefox
$ ../firefox-update/updater ../firefox-update 0

This will have the effect of applying the update. When this command returns look in the firefox-update directory for two files: update.status and update.log. If the update was applied successfully, then update.status will contain the text "succeeded". If it does not indicate success, then update.log file may be consulted to figure out at what step the update failed. A failed update should leave the original Firefox directory intact.

Details

It is important to run the updater from the directory that you wish to update. Otherwise, the update will not apply properly.

On Windows it is necessary to run a copy of the updater executable, otherwise you will be trying to update a running executable, which will result in a failure as well. On Linux, this is not a problem, so it is possible to skip the step of copying the updater executable.

The "0" parameter passed on the command line specifies the PID of a process to wait on before applying the update. When applying updates manually this should be 0 to disable the wait step.