In response to the dev-planning thread last week about potentially extending downtime windows, I’ve updated the release engineering documentation for downtimes to provide clear instructions to the person on buildduty about who to notify for a given downtime, while also providing more information to developers who may still be trying to get work done around the downtime.
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Joey has been tasked with streamlining some of the more arcane parts of the Mozilla build system. Since he’s spent a good deal of time trying to get acquainted with these systems in order to work with and change them, he’s started blogging about how some of it works.
His first post on make-makefile is up now, and there is more coming soon.
I don’t generally use the buildbot waterfall for day-to-day status any more, mostly because (in it’s current incarnation) it grinds the master to a halt.
However, I *do* sometimes look at the waterfall while messing around on my own development master, and I still have my userscript installed, which I’ve updated over time to label some of our newer build types and platforms.
Here’s the current version:
With Mozilla Messaging being folded back into Mozilla, one of the outstanding questions (well, I’ve been wondering at least) was what would become of the existing Thunderbird build engineers. I’m pleased to announce that one of them, John Hopkins, has officially joined the Mozilla Release Engineering team as of Monday this week.
It will be business as usual for John for now, but in the weeks to come we’ll be looking hard at how best to go about integrating the Mozilla Messaging release processes and continuous integration into the current Mozilla releng systems.
Note: this also upsets the delicate John-to-Chris ratio in releng. If you’re a release engineer looking for work (bonus points if your name is Chris), we are still hiring.
Welcome, John! Glad to have you aboard.
As discussed in a previous post, today we deployed the change to have dated dirs on ftp.mozilla.org to use new longer BuildID.
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It seems I’ve been remiss in welcoming a new hire to my subgroup of Mozilla Release Engineering.
Joey Armstrong is a Makefile whiz, and he’s going to be taking a stab at improving turnaround time on incremental builds and generally simplifying our Makefile story. John rightly gave up waiting for me to blog about Joey starting, and has written a post of his own explaining in more depth why Joey’s work is important. I’ll just add that we’ve done a lot of work recently in RelEng trying to identify long poles in our current build/test process. This effort has largely focused on re-assorting jobs and using hardware in smarter ways. It is awesome to have someone on the team now who is specifically tasked with trying to shorten the build process itself.
So…welcome, Joey!
I recently inherited bug 449607 from joduinn. He’s already done most of the legwork here driving the issue to consensus, but he simply hasn’t had the time to push it to completion in the midst of managing our more rapid release cycle.
Rather than re-opening the issue for fresh debate, I’m hoping I can simply restate our intentions, and also get the attention of anyone relying on the current directory format who hasn’t chimed in yet.
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Localized (l10n) Mozilla builds are are not strictly speaking “builds,” but rather repacks. We take an existing US English (en-US) build, unpack it, replace the text elements with strings for a different language, and then pack it back up again.
We still need a source code checkout for each repack because the source contains the actual instructions for repackaging. Mercifully we’re able to share a single source checkout between multiple localized repacks because, depending on the code branch, we could have upwards of 80 locales to deal with and each source checkout could be almost 1GB .
Sharing source code is helpful in that regard…until something goes wrong.
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The long-missing Litmus tutorial has been resurrected. Unfortunately, it isn’t nearly as useful as it could be since it hasn’t been updated since 2007.
If you’re a current Litmus user, you’re already more awesome than most. If you’d like to take a stab at updating the Litmus Tutorial to reflect the current state of Litmus usage, I’m more than happy to help out any way I can with proofreading, etc.
I don’t really do resolutions, but I am resolved to start paying a little more attention to my ongoing house project. Realizing I hadn’t posted anything since the initial demo, I posted a bunch more construction photos from the last few months to flickr .
I’m still not entirely up-to-date, but we’re getting closer.
