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Kiss the Future goodbye

Posted 3 weeks, 5 days ago at 19:49. 1 comment

Flaming tire tracksLet it never be said that we don’t listen.

In response to the comments on my previous entry about Tackling the Release Engineering:Future queue and a number of conversations I’ve had out-of-band over the past few months, the release engineering team has decided to do away with the Future component. We will be merging all of the bugs therein back into the regular Release Engineering component.

Aside from the simplicity inherent in having fewer components to worry about, there were three main reasons we chose to do this: Continue Reading…

Current Tunes: New Order - Blue Monday | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla

Tackling the Release Engineering:Future queue

Posted 1 month ago at 17:22. 4 comments

Bart falls down a well.The Release Engineering:Future bugzilla component alternately inspires feelings of sadness, loathing, and contempt…and that’s just within the RelEng team!

I’m certain most developers first response to having their bug moved to the Future queue is, “Oh, look, my bug has fallen down a well.” Historically speaking, that may not be far from the truth.
Continue Reading…

Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 306 - Andy Moor - 2010-02-05 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla

All about the RelEng sheriff, revisited

Posted 1 month ago at 15:37. 0 comments

Sheriff badgeThis is a follow-up to Ben’s blog post about the RelEng Sheriff back in October. His post described clearly what the RelEng Sheriff (and more generally, the RelEng team) can do to help developers.

Since we implemented the RelEng sheriff (or “buildduty” as it is more informally called) last spring, developers have been getting better about using the buildduty person as the first point of contact for RelEng issues. I’d like to implore people to continue doing so. There are a few exceptions, of course:
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Current Tunes: The Gareth Emery Podcast - Episode 96 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla

Nomenclature

Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago at 11:03. 9 comments

Bruce Lee vs. Chuck NorrisRecognizing some existing internal group dynamics and the need for the entire Mozilla release engineering (RelEng) team to grow in a more sustainable manner, we recently started an internal reorganization of the RelEng group. John will likely blog about the new structure of the group at some point, but I’ll relate the bits that are pertinent to me.
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Current Tunes: Digitalism - Echoes | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla

No problems

Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago at 11:05. 1 comment

Off the railsThe Mozilla release engineering (RelEng) team has grown substantially over the past two years. Some members of the team have certain domain-specific focuses (e.g. talos, mobile), but one of our primary team goals has been to get our release automation to the point where anyone on our team can handle a release. Given the emerging branch picture for Mozilla code where we might see simultaneous releases on 3+ code branches (a.k.a release-apalooza), this is becoming increasingly important.

I’ve done my share of releases over the past few quarters, and until the current release (3.5.4, still in progress as of writing), I would have said that I understood the process pretty well.
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Current Tunes: Jaytech Music Podcast 022 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla

Consequences of l10n nightly updates

Posted 6 months, 1 week ago at 21:56. 1 comment

Unforeseen consequencesThe 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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Current Tunes: Klaxons - Golden Skans | Filed under Build/Release, Firefox, Mozilla, l10n

Nightly updates for localized builds on mozilla-central

Posted 6 months, 3 weeks ago at 17:22. 4 comments

We’ve reached another milestone in our ongoing effort to elevate localized (l10n) builds to first class citizens within the Mozilla release engineering framework.

Last week, Armen flipped the configuration switch to turn on nightly updates for l10n builds on mozilla-central. After a few downtime-related hiccups last week that tanked nightly builds across the board, this morning we were finally able to serve partial updates to l10n nightly users on all platforms.

This is another huge step forward. Nightly testers who use localized builds no longer have to download an entirely new localized browser every day, but can instead rely on the Firefox update service to automatically download a much smaller binary partial update for them. Aside from allowing us to make sure l10n nightly testers are always testing the most recent code and string changes, this may also allow us to recruit a new batch of nightly l10n testers who were previously worried about the bandwidth involved in helping us test on an ongoing basis.

Over the coming weeks we’re hoping to enable l10n nightly updates on the newly-cut 1.92 branch as well. We are dealing with many more builds passing through the staging server to the update generation machinery now, so there’s some housekeeping to be done first to make sure that no builds, mars, or snippets are piling up in dark dusty corners anywhere.

Thanks to Armen for daring to touch the update code at all, to Nick for his update support, and to Axel for his tireless l10n work.

Current Tunes: Moby - Alice | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, l10n

Prevent missing files in your hg commit

Posted 8 months ago at 17:46. 7 comments

The Mozilla RelEng team was having one of our patented digressional discussions in IRC yesterday when we got around to the subject of hg irritations. My personal annoyance was that I frequently need to check-in patches for other people who don’t have commit access, but I don’t always remember to check before pushing to make sure I didn’t miss adding any new files created by the patch.

Because Ted is more about solving problems than bitching about them, he suggested I write a hook to prevent myself from missing files. Here it is:

[hooks]
precommit = hg status | (! grep '^?')

Add that to your .hgrc file (and setup some good global hgignore rules) and you’re golden.

Current Tunes: Moist - Push | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, Software

Lots of small steps add up to big changes

Posted 9 months, 1 week ago at 12:11. 2 comments

Mozilla localizers at the Firefox'08 Summit in WhistlerWhat a difference a year makes.

In fact, it was less than a year ago that Armen and John gave this presentation at the Summit in Whistler outlining the then-current problems with the l10n build system as it related to release engineering.

Axel has a new post up about how we’ve been systematically addressing those failings over the last 10 months, and what we’re tackling next.

We’re all about lowering bars to entry into the Mozilla community. I’m thrilled to see our localized Firefox builds approaching parity with the default English (en-US) builds. Not requiring potential localizers to have a complete translation before they can get meaningful feedback, and greatly reducing the turnaround time for that feedback to a few minutes is huge. Taking the stress of generating those builds off of Axel’s shoulders is also a big deal, because it gives him more time to work on other improvements for the l10n community.

There is more work still to do, certainly, but we’re a lot better off than a year ago. Cheers to Aki, Armen, Axel, John, and Seth for their help in getting us this far.

Current Tunes: Beastie Boys - The Sounds of Science | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, l10n

Armen is back!

Posted 10 months ago at 10:59. 0 comments

Let me join joduinn in welcoming back Armen to Mozilla, this time as an actual employee.

Armen tackled some pretty hairy stuff during his internship, and he’s not shying away from the tough stuff now either. His first task will be helping me to get nightly updates rolling for l10n builds. This is something we’ve wanted to provide to localizers and non-en-US testers for a long time, and are only finally getting the human bandwidth to tackle now.

So, welcome back, Armen! Let’s get to work! :)

NB: Our VP Eng should probably keep a spare shirt on-hand if he’s going to be working in the same office as Armen.

Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 267 - Kyau & Albert - 2009-05-08 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla