The maintainers of AMO have just sent out email announcing that as of February 22, they will no longer support the beta release channel. That means add-ons on AMO can't have beta-testers using separate beta releases of their add-ons unless the add-on maintainers host the beta releases elsewhere themselves, including providing their own implementation of the automatic update manifests currently provided automatically by AMO. I use and benefit from the ability to have beta-testers of my add-on. I really don't want to have to build out and maintain my own hosting infrastructure just to be able to keep doing that. Will the new Thunderbird add-on hosting site that's being stood up continue to support beta release channels for add-ons, or is it, too, going to desupport that functionality?   Jonathan Kamens

On 2018-02-05 11:35 AM, Jonathan Kamens wrote: > I use and benefit from the ability to have beta-testers of my add-on. > I really don't want to have to build out and maintain my own hosting > infrastructure just to be able to keep doing that. > > Will the new Thunderbird add-on hosting site that's being stood up > continue to support beta release channels for add-ons, or is it, too, > going to desupport that functionality? > Well until today I didn't even know this functionality existed :) The patches to remove this support have not been created yet, looks like this is tracked in https://github.com/mozilla/addons-server/issues/7163 It is difficult for us to preserve arbitrary functionality. We have no web developers. At some point we are going to have to freeze and fully fork, and at that point, there will likely never be feature updates or changes to our addons site. I would like that to be after they are finished doing the upgrade to Django 1.11 because it's a large patch and being on 1.11(the current LTS) gives us the longest window of security support before we need to invest in an alternate site or in dev resources. If the patch to remove this beta functionality is relatively simple I can just undo it on our side and we can keep following their addons-server master. However, if they make additional changes which depend on that patch, things could get very complicated very quickly. It's hard to say until I see the patches because I don't know addons-server code that well.