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Posted 3 weeks, 1 day ago at 12:01. 4 comments
This post is primarily directed at my family, friends, and anyone who I’ve helped to install Firefox over the years. Hopefully my co-workers already know how awesome we are.
A new version of Firefox is coming out on Tuesday. Casual internet users may be asking themselves, “I already have a web browser. Why should I update to Firefox 3?” There’s lots of great stuff in Firefox 3, but several of the new features bear special highlighting for casual users:
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Current Tunes: Casual, Rock Marciano, Vordual Mega, & Tragedy Khadafi - Think Differently | Filed under Build/Release, Family, Firefox, Friends, Mozilla, Software
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 11:01. 0 comments
I spent the last week getting debug+leak testing slaves setup on our 3 key platforms for Moz2. This moves us a little closer to build system parity with current trunk development.
I’ve put my setup notes in the wiki to aid the next person.
Current Tunes: Crystal Method - Roll It Up | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 16:33. 0 comments
Thanks to justdave for creating the new LeakTest and UnitTest tinderbox trees, we no longer have to wade through the morass that is MozillaTest to find these test results, which will hopefully help in getting more eyes on them.
The LeakTest tree will house results from our debug+leak+unittest boxes as they come online. Only Linux and Mac are available right now, and both tend to wedge themselves after a few cycles. Windows coverage is stalled on getting enough storage attached to cope with the ginormous log files.
The UnitTest tree will house, surprise, unittest staging boxes, but also any new unittest boxes we’re in the process of bringing up, or any production unittest boxes that need to be alone with themselves for a little while, e.g. WinXP.
Current Tunes: Thievery Corporation - Lebanese Blonde | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago at 15:32. 0 comments
Many moons ago, I put together some binary-object-only packages of Talkback for the various community projects. As we offloaded the management of the community build machines to the community project teams themselves, this allowed us to continue offering Talkback to those projects for the collection of crash data while avoiding the need to encumber them directly with the Talkback source agreement. This wasn’t an issue in the past when Netscape/AOL/Mozilla build engineers just took care of everything.
Well, thanks for being guinea pigs, guys. Just this week, we’ve switched the Firefox and Thunderbird branch builds to use prebuilt Talkback packages too. In our case, it’s more about simplifying the build process by not having to bridge both private and public CVS repositories, but the outcome is the same.
Current Tunes: GrooveSalad, courtesy of SomaFM | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago at 21:30. 1 comment
In case you weren’t following the stream of curses in IRC last Thursday — alternately, robcee and myself cursing at buildbot slaves, and developers cursing at us — clobber support for the buildbot unit test machines has landed. My apologies for the disruption it caused. The payoff is that developers can now clobber unit test machines via CVS in a similar manner to the build machines. Each improvement makes these very fragile machines a little less touchy, and allows us to be more hands-off with them.
All the clobbering self-help instructions can be found in the wiki.
Current Tunes: Digitalism - Zdarlight | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, QA
Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago at 20:57. 0 comments
Ah, there’s always an Irish proverb to fit the bill (especially if the bill happens to be a bar tab).
There are 4 new unit test buildbot slaves in the mix:
- qm-leak-centos5-01
- qm-leak-macosx-01
- qm-leak-winxp01
- qm-leak-w2k3-01
These machines are a little different: they’re producing debug builds and are running the standard suite of unit tests (reftest, mochitest, mochichrome, and browser chrome), but they are doing so with trace-malloc, bloat, and leak logging enabled as well.
These unit test build machines are currently reporting to the MozillaTest tinderbox tree. Jeff Walden has had a preliminary look at the output, but the tests still remain chronically red/orange. What we need now are more eyeballs to compare the failures we’re seeing on these boxes with the output of the same tests on the unit test machines reporting to the Firefox tree to tease out the legitimate failures and get bugs filed.
If you are interested in helping, you can find more information about debugging memory leaks at the Mozilla Developer Center.
Current Tunes: Gabriel & Dresden - Essential Mix - 2003-03-09 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, QA
Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago at 19:59. 2 comments
Today is preed’s last day at Mozilla. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve written this blog post before.
First and most importantly, mad props to preed. We were both thrown to the wolves when Chase left, but by virtue of you being on-site, you had to shoulder the brunt of the build team burden. You held the team — and by extension the company and, dare I say, the project — together through sheer force of will in early 2006. It wasn’t always pretty, but stuff got done. You also set in motion many of the release procedure improvements and automation plans that are paying dividends now. Those of us who remain behind in the build team are profoundly grateful.
The build team is a much different entity today than when Chase left. For one, it’s actually a team now, implying more than 1 person. But have any of the other concerns Chase raised when he left been addressed? I personally notice a lot more Firefox hate in the blogosphere these days (I won’t dignify it by linking to it), much of it related to Mozilla not being open enough. Part of that comes from becoming a bigger target now in terms of market share. We’ve also grown concomitantly as a company.
Admittedly my perspective from inside the Mozilla corporation might seem skewed or Pollyanna, but I can now cautiously dismiss the opacity Chase saw at the time (and feared was endemic) to organizational growing pains. As we’ve grown, people who’ve traditionally had their noses in everything — Mozilla employees *and* community members — have had to learn to take a step back and trust the really smart people we’ve hired to do the jobs they were hired for. I think we’re doing a better job these days of keeping everyone abreast of what’s going on at a level that is sufficient to keep people from panicking that stuff is being dropped on the floor. That hasn’t been easy, and it does require a non-zero amount of effort from everyone involved on an ongoing basis to make sure that it’s always the case. Eternal vigilance, and all that.
We’re still incredibly small in a corporate sense, especially relative to the user base we are trying to support. We are also not perfect. It’s easy for people to take potshots at, e.g. Mitchell’s blog posts, but Mozilla is trying to do something no open source project has done before. People are right to call us out when we misstep (and there will be missteps), but you’ll have to trust me (and our track record) when I say that our heart is in the right place. We err on the side of being more open rather than less every single time it’s an issue and the community has a genuine interest or need to know.
We’ve lost some good people recently at Mozilla. It’s been very public and, at times, very painful. I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow…er, preed. There will be much sadness and scotch tonight, and not just because it’s a Monday.
It’s been a pleasure and an honor, sir.
Current Tunes: BT - Fibonacci Sequence | Filed under Build/Release, Friends, Mozilla
Posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago at 11:26. 0 comments
I’m adding my name to the growing list of Mozilla people attending FSOSS 2007 in Toronto at the end of October. I missed out on FSOSS last year, and everyone involved seems to have had a blast. It’s rare to have a relevant conference within VIA1 striking distance of Ottawa, so I’m taking a stab this year.
What will I be doing? Well, first and foremost, the Mozilla QA team has a testday scheduled for the Friday, Oct. 26th with a focus on OS Integration on Vista & Mac, with a secondary focus on Installer testing. Between sessions, I’ll be plugging into testday, and hopefully leading an impromptu remote testday in conjunction with Club Moz @ Seneca. It’s no secret that Seneca has also been a fruitful recruiting ground for us in the past, so I’ll also be chatting with students and generally trying to get people excited about plugging in to the Mozilla community.
Hope to see lots of folks there.
Posted 10 months, 1 week ago at 11:32. 5 comments
I’m in the process of wading into the Mozilla Buildbot story. It’s a little murky, and things seem to be trying to grab my ankles, but otherwise the water looks strangely familiar so far.
Tinderbox is a bit of a beast, have no doubt. Much of the base code remains unchanged since I first interacted with it in 1998, but we’ve made some key improvements “recently.” Things like automatic config updating from CVS and CLOBBER support have reduced our Tinderbox maintenance substantially, and need to find their way into our Buildbot setup ASAP (bugs are on file for as much). Buildbot allows us to do some things in a much smarter way than Tinderbox, but our current Buildbot setup seems like a bit of a step backwards for me maintenance-wise.
I’m happy to bring my experiences with Tinderbox to bear on the problem. Hopefully we can apply those hard-learned lessons and quickly get to a better maintenance state.
Current Tunes: The Orb - DJ Asylum (7" Edit) | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, QA
Posted 1 year, 1 month ago at 16:44. 0 comments
Various things have conspired against us getting this done in a timely manner, not the least of which is the pending release of 1.5.0.12/2.0.0.4 which is coming RSN. The key impediment has been that many of the affected VMs are in active use for respins for these releases.
Once the respins are done and the release is safely out the door, mrz will start shuffling VMs around again, although we’ll be able to give everyone more accurate downtime information this time around since we’ve been through the process once now already.
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Current Tunes: George Gershwin - Rhapsody In Blue | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
