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Posted 4 months, 1 week 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 09:52. 0 comments
It appears there were some issues with the migration last night. Litmus and other services (e.g. Bugzilla) are currently experiencing connection issues. We have top men working on it right now.
UPDATE: we’re back now.
Also, in case people hadn’t noticed, Vlad was nice enough to send me a copy of the tiny dino head he used for his fancy new icons. The Litmus favicon is now sporting it too.
Current Tunes: Beef Wellington - From The One 2 | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla
Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago at 15:54. 0 comments
IT has announced that there will be some brief (~1 hr) Litmus downtime tonight between 8pm-12am PDT as the host VM gets moved to a new storage array. More information can be found in the Scheduled Maintenance newspost.
Current Tunes: Rage Against The Machine - Killing In The Name | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla
Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago at 14:07. 0 comments
My friend and co-worker, Mike Shaver gives a great interview over at howsoftwareisbuilt.com about just how Mozilla operates and what motivates us. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s had the misfortune of listening to me try to describe what Mozilla does.
Current Tunes: Dr. Dre - Deeez Nuuuts | Filed under Friends, Mozilla
Posted 6 months, 1 week 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 6 months, 3 weeks 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 7 months 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 9 months, 1 week ago at 22:35. 0 comments
I’m not even supposed to be here today, but I just had to write a little something about the Firefox 3 Beta 1 test day that we ran last week.
Tomcat says that some of the European tech press picked up our testday announcement, and it certainly showed. Lots of new faces in #testday, and over 1300 test results filed by the community over the course of the day (another 270 if you add results from Mozilla QA staff). This was even more impressive considering that this was the second test day we held last week. In the past we’ve seen an attendance drop-off if we hold events too close together.
People seem genuinely stoked about Firefox 3. Lots of testing remains to be done, so I hope to see a lot of those folks back to help some more. Keep it locked to QMO for details.
Current Tunes: The Orb - Bedouin | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 15:06. 5 comments
I had the privilege of attending FSOSS last week.
This is a great open source conference put on by the people at Seneca college in Toronto. The conference is now in its second year, and is priced right to actually allow many smaller open source ventures or individuals to attend. I even got the opportunity to talk to a few high school students who were able to attend because the price point didn’t overwhelm their nascent interest. But I digress…
One of the major themes this year was building community and the various problems inherent therein. Even Microsoft sent a speaker, Bryan Kirschner, to discuss how Microsoft is trying to build a community around its own open source efforts. Regardless of whether you trust Microsoft’s initiatives or not, I respect Bryan a lot for coming into what has traditionally been a very hostile environment and trying to rally support without being defensive.
A lot of projects — e.g. Microsoft, OpenKomodo, Miro — are just starting (relatively speaking) to build their communities. They’re dealing with issues that are a little different than ours: how do I attract people to my project vs. project X? Some of these projects have the added benefit of being newer and/or flashier than us (Miro). Some of the projects will be effectively capped by their target audience (OpenKomodo). Microsoft just has to get past 25 years of bad blood. 
Mozilla shares the recruitment problem of these other projects, but increasingly our problem is also one of retention: how do we keep the testers we already have (many of the newer projects *are* seductive), and how do we embrace new people who do show up to help and not scare them away?
Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: Stereo MC's - Playing With Fire | Filed under Mozilla, Open Web, QA
Posted 10 months 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
