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In my previous post, I outlined the four main parts in our plan of attack for making the build system faster. But how will we know how well we’re doing, and how will we know when we’re done? How fast is fast enough?
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Joey continues his series examining make-makefiles internals over at his blog.
He’s doing thankless work in documenting the existing build config system. Of course, it’s all building up to Joey’s work on container makefiles where he’s going to change it all. 
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 realized the other day that I hadn’t done a post about my favorite add-ons since Firefox 1.5. The add-on landscape has changed a lot since that time, sufficiently so that I think it merits an updated post with a short blurb about why I love/need each extension. I’m using some add-ons for Thunderbird too, so I’ve included those as well.
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Another positive outcome from the recent work to generate nightly updates on the buildslaves is that we now have update generation tools that work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. There been some interest in the past from other software projects about using our update tools, but I know that getting all of the mozilla source setup to build just these tools is non-trivial, especially if your software isn’t Mozilla-based to begin with.
I’ve packaged up the update tools for each platform from a recent mozilla-central nightly and put them under the xulrunner directory on ftp:
I’ve also updated our wiki documentation about how we make our nightly updates for Firefox to give people a fighting chance of figuring out how to use these tools for their own purposes.
Enjoy!
For those who want to skip to my specific proposals — there are 6 — for reclaiming space on stage.mozilla.org, please skip ahead to “Redux”, but if you’re going to comment, please read the whole thing.
Everyday we produce up to 17G worth of new nightly builds for Firefox across all branches. This includes all opt+debug builds in 75+ locales, each on 4 operating systems (OSes), each on 9 different project branches. We do reclaim much of this 17G as we retire l10n builds older than 1 week, but we are still creating 1.3G of new nightly en-US builds that we need to store (essentially) indefinitely. nthomas did some cleanup recently as part of bug 562261 and that has bought us some more time, but this inexorable increase will eventually overrun our disk capacity on the staging server. If we add to this disk usage by nightlies from other products which may have worse nightly hygiene habits and the expected increase in space requirements every night as we add 4 new OSes (adding Linux 64bit, Windows 64bit, OSX10.6 64bit and Android), the problem is magnified.
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The roll-out of nightly l10n updates has been…bumpy. The primary user-visible symptom of this has been that nightly updates for en-US have sometimes been delayed by many hours when compared to when they would have been generated previously.
I hesitate to say that these consequences were unforeseen, but rather that we were initially unsure how/if the various systems we use to generate, store and serve updates would even cope when they had to deal with more than one locale.
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Nothing irritates me more than something that *almost* works.
I recently purchased a Razer ProType keyboard. On the whole, I like the keyboard feel and layout, although their claim of minimalism is somewhat laughable. It is easily the largest thing on my desk right now, and is probably 50% larger than the standard Apple pack-in keyboard. I didn’t buy it for its size though, I bought it for the programmable keys and application-switchable profiles.
e.g. I have one macro key bound to a piece of AppleScript that automagically queues up the entire album for the currently playing iTunes track while I’m in my Desktop, and the same key is also bound to my mount macro when I’m playing WoW.
On the far left-hand side of the keyboard is an innocuous little button named “Home,” that according to the manual is supposed to “allow user to access browser home page.” By “browser,” they of course meant Safari.
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Inspired by Jesse’s work on TidyBox, I’ve adapted his Greasemonkey script to do the same type of column/row collapsing for the buildbot waterfall.
I’ve gone to the extreme here, minimizing everything and putting the contents into pop-ups. With this script running, I can *almost* fit our entire staging buildbot waterfall onto a single screen. Almost.
The classnames used in the script should be universally applicable to any buildbot installation. Tweak away, if that’s your deal.
I’ve updated the Wow Realm Status extension so that it now properly parses both EU servers and RP-PvP servers. Kev offered me scotch. I told you that would work.
