

Software Updates: Courgette (2009) - gws
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software-updates-courgette

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AceJohnny2
From 2009. Here's the blog post announcing it:
[http://blog.chromium.org/2009/07/smaller-is-faster-and-
safer...](http://blog.chromium.org/2009/07/smaller-is-faster-and-safer-
too.html)

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sanxiyn
What happened to software patent litigation against Google concerning
Courgette?

[http://lwn.net/Articles/359939/](http://lwn.net/Articles/359939/)

~~~
btilly
Good question. [http://www.law360.com/articles/236158/google-dodges-
injuncti...](http://www.law360.com/articles/236158/google-dodges-injunction-
in-web-browser-ip-suit) shows that in 2011, Red Bend did not get a preliminary
injunction.

What happened after that is a good question. But
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504624](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504624)
includes a comment dated 2013-09-24 12:57:04 PDT saying that things are sorted
out, and Courgette can be used.

So apparently some sort of private settlement resulted with little publicity.

~~~
ksec
I was thinking the same when i saw Opera will be using Courgette for update
too.

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positr0n
Is bandwidth really the limiting factor for updating desktop applications?

If you had asked me I would have guessed the limitation would be QA time.
Surely they need to do some manual QA before pushing a release to prod, and
surely that is more expensive than bandwidth.

That being said, it's a really cool project and I'm not at all arguing it
shouldn't exist because it does improve the user's experience.

~~~
whacker
I think the argument is that users are more likely to be happy with software
updating itself if the updates are un-noticeably tiny.

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emmelaich
I note there are quite a few recent commits with fixes to what could be
security vulnerabilities.

e.g. Robust ELF header parsing, NULL pointer access, memory leak, undefined
behavior.

So probably should update if you use it!

What is the bet someone has been stressing it with American Fuzzy Lop.

------
sylvinus
I wonder how useful this could be for large-scale server-side code deploys?

~~~
Scaevolus
Courgette is a very CPU-intensive transformation. It pays a large time/space
tradeoff to minimize bandwidth required.

Server-side code deploys are usually not so bandwidth limited.

Facebook used a BitTorrent-based approach for a while:
[http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/exclusive-a-
behind-t...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/exclusive-a-behind-the-
scenes-look-at-facebook-release-engineering/)

