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Posted 1 year, 1 month 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 1 year, 1 month ago at 12:24. 3 comments
This afternoon I’ll be installing a real SSL certificate for the Litmus web server to address some long-standing privacy concerns. We’ll have a redirect rule in place, so this is mainly just a heads-up so that people aren’t surprised if/when they see the cert dialog appear.
See you soon at https://litmus.mozilla.org/!
Update: the SSL site is up now with nary a cert pop-up to be seen. Nice.
Current Tunes: Sublime - Doin' Time | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla
Posted 1 year, 1 month 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 1 year, 1 month ago at 09:42. 0 comments
An overused aphorism, perhaps, but if I could strap a saddle to this mountain of email, I might ride through it a little faster.
To answer your question, yes, the vacation was good (photos coming soon). Your patience is appreciated while I get back up to speed over the next few days. I’ll be beating on tinderbox/buildbot/Litmus soon enough, to be sure.
Current Tunes: Steve Lawler - Essential Mix - 2005/07/17 | Filed under Mozilla, Travel
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 11:01. 0 comments
As shaver pointed out in his recent spate of blogging, the good folks at ActiveState announced the Open Komodo Project last week. As a long-time user of the Komodo IDE myself, this is exciting news. For me, working at Mozilla is as much a philosophical choice as anything else, so it’s always encouraging to find another company that gets “it,” where “it” is the Open Web.
Congrats to ActiveState on their announcement. Their community site offers more info about how to get involved if you’re so inclined.
Current Tunes: Mute Math - Noticed | Filed under Mozilla, Open Web, Software
Posted 1 year, 2 months 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, 6 months 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.
Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: George Gershwin - Rhapsody In Blue | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 15:49. 0 comments
- There will some Litmus downtime tonight starting at 7:30pm PDT as the Litmus server receives a kernel upgrade. Further details are available in moz.dev.planning.
- The Litmus Admin tutorial is now available on the new QMO portal. Thanks to Jay for investing a lot of time and effort to get this site off the ground as the new epicenter of all things related to Mozilla testing. I encourage people to join the forums and participate. There is already a discussion taking place about the various existing out-of-date QA docs that should be pulled into QMO and updated.
- I’ve spent the last few days helping a German group get their own Litmus install up-and-running. Those experiences and gotchas have seeded the Litmus Install FAQ. I encourage others to contribute their own specific experience to this document. It may help save someone else some pain.
Current Tunes: Trespassers William - What Could I Say | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 10:41. 0 comments
The builds populating the XULRunner-Mozilla1.8.0 tinderbox tree are going to be disabled today. To quote bsmedberg from bug 378809:
The 1.8.0 branch is pretty much dead, and all our efforts are focused on the trunk.
As is the way of all things in OSS, that code is still going to exist, we’re just not going to be building it in tinderbox any more, or actively supporting those builds. People are encouraged to investigate the XULRunner trunk instead.
Current Tunes: DJ Gregory - Essential Mix - 2003-11-30 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 10:25. 0 comments
The Mozilla build farm grew rather organically at the outset. We ended up with a lot of legacy tinderbox systems that were all installed and configured differently. This was especially true for Linux, which can be installed on just about any piece of hardware.
The tinderbox code requires an X server of some sort running on Linux so that it can fire up a new build and run basic tests on it, but there are almost as many ways setup to do this on the Linux tinderboxen as there are machines themselves.
Yesterday, we moved balsa-18branch, a Redhat 7.2 VM, to a new VM host, but attempts to restart the X server as the build user failed with a console ownership error: PAM authentication failed, cannot start X server.
This mailing list post got me most of the way there, but the proper PATH to the file that needed to be touch-ed was actually /var/run/console/USERNAME.
Maybe this will help someone else out, but really, I’m just recording it here so I don’t forget it myself next time I need to restart that VM.
Current Tunes: Trespassers William - It's Been A Shame | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
