Tuesday, September 19th, 2006
Tonight, with help from morgamic and sspitzer, we’ve published Firefox’s first ever “major update.”
This type of update is intended to pull people from (for instance) 1.5.0.7 to 2.0. We won’t be immediately publishing any major updates (including that particular update path). It includes the ability to display EULAs and allow users to ignore the major update, including forever (so they can stay on 1.5.0.x, if they wanted).
We’ll be doing a couple of tests:
- We’ve published an update for build 2006091813, win32/en-US only; most people have already updated to today’s nightly, but if you’d like to try it out, you can download that build, run it, and check for updates. You should get offered a major update to “2.0mt1″ (“mt” stands for “major [update] testing”).
- Within the next couple of days (hopefully tomorrow afternoon), we’ll run a clobber build on the 1.8 branch, for all platforms/en-US, and publish an update to those builds that is a major update (will likely offer itself as “2.0mt2″).
If you’d like to help test out the major update functionality, Seth, morgamic and I, along with millions of users, and at least a couple of pirates, would much appreciate it!
mozilla, planetmoz
Releng Machinery | 8 Comments »
V56
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006
I’m about to board the Air Canada red-eye1 to present to Seneca’s Open Source course on the wonderful and intriguing world of Mozilla builds!
The TSA was intent on taking my deodorant, so if something smells amiss… remember, it was all to save freedom.
_____________
1 Yes, yes, perfect timing… I know…
mozilla, planetmoz
blahblahblah | Comments Off
V55
Thursday, September 14th, 2006
In case you’ve only ever read this “blahg” via its RSS feed, the tagline reads “What does a Build Engineer do all day, anyway?”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the answer to that question.
When I think about what my answer actually is, day-in-day-out—doing builds, triaging broken builds, restarting automatic builds, respinning builds, making sure there’s enough space for builds, signing builds, staging builds, getting new places for people to get builds, fighting fires on the machines the builds are created on, making sure the builds… well… you get the idea—it all seems somewhat… repetitious.
(And the more I look back at that, actually somewhat depressing.)
But even though we, Rob, Coop, TR, and I, do work on those things, I’m pretty sure we all think about other things, especially the fourth or fifth time in a day you’ve logged into the same Tinderbox to kick it.
Part of this recent introspection about what we work on, what we want to work on, and what we should work on was prompted by a question Schrep posed to me a week or so ago: we had just finished a company-wide discussion of goals and missions and he asked off the cuff what the Build Team’s manifesto would be, if we had one.
Something along the lines of “What should we be thinking about in the day-to-day that prompts us to work on things that have perceptible, positive impact, not only for ourselves, but for everyone else?”
There are the obvious ones: doing builds, triaging broken builds, restarting… well… you know… but isn’t there more than that?
Should there be more than that?
If you’ve ever talked to Rhelmer or I right after a release, our reaction to the mere mention of the word “build” implies that there should be.
In trying to tackle the answer, the only thing I could think of was make a list. As I sat there, trying to brainstorm what the list should include, I found myself jotting down the things I think about all day (and sometimes worry about at night). Some of them had that dirty, five-letter b-word… but a surprising (to me) number had nothing to do with that.
As I sit here, counting the thirty-plus items on my laundry list, I wonder if anyone would be surprised that someone thinks about these aspects of a software project that stare back at me. Does anyone really care what the number of old builds we store says about us?
Or why bumping versions is a big deal?
Or what the deal with centralized build data stores is?
Ok, so maybe people wouldn’t be surprised.
But, still I wonder. I’ve been in situations where I’ve been asked “Hey, can you guys do X?” When my answer isn’t what they expect, it sometimes prompts what can be an involved conversation about why the answer wasn’t a simple and immediate “Yes.”
I think such conversations are useful in the long run.
But I can’t help think if there were a good answer to the question my “blahg’s” tagline poses, then maybe some of my weird answers to questions would make more sense to others sooner.
As a bonus, if I could distill the common themes behind those day-to-day answers, I might just have the makings of a manifesto that would at least frame our discussion for what unique qualities we bring to the “MozillaVerse” (or are the cool kids calling it “Mozillasphere” these days?)
Think of it as an attempt at a JoelOnSoftware knockoff, except… without all that annoying credibility and pestering about having created-Visual-Basic-for-Applications-but- before-it-was-called-that-because-I-only-worked-on-Excel-at-the-time getting in the way.
On the downside, I will admit: it is highly likely there will be fewer treatises on the speed of duck-typing.
mozilla, planetmoz
Preed on Build/Release Engineering | Comments Off
V54
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
You’d think 1.9 terrabytes of disk storage would be enough for Mozilla’s builds, but… it’s not.
In fact, with all the simultaneous releases going on lately, we’ve had to spend a lot of time babysitting the chronically under-spaced stage.m.o.
Fortunately, we now have a replacement and a plan to get us using it.
In addition to giving us another terrabyte of storage, we’ll be able to reclaim some diskspace on the current arrays, and provide better verification of builds going out to the mirror farm.
The plan is to migrate stage.m.o and ftp.m.o to differet machines this Thursday. The downtime will start at 6 pm PDT and end at midnight.
Details of the plans can be found on the Wiki, including changes for contributors posting builds (they should be minimal).
If there are any questions or concerns, please feel free to email build@mozilla.org with them.
mozilla, planetmoz
Releng Machinery | 2 Comments »
V53
Monday, September 11th, 2006
Last Friday, after [*cough* too many *cough*] hours of flight time[due entirely to me dragging my own feet], I drove out to the Palo Alto Airport and took my private pilot checkride with FAA-designated pilot examiner Mike Shiflett.
The first part—the oral test—went smoothly… and quickly!
I then gathered the weather for the second part, the practical flight test. Everything looked great on paper, but after pre-flighting the plane and getting out to the runway, an almost-direct crosswind of 12-gusting-15 knots, made this part of the test more… interesting. Much more interesting.
But after ninety minutes of doing various types of takeoffs, landings, stalls, and flight maneuvers, the examiner flew us back to the airport.
I guess I managed to trick him into thinking I knew what I was doing.1
To celebrate, I flew a couple of close friends to O69 today for my first $100 hamburger.
Both being photo nerds, they took some pretty incredible pictures.2
________________________________
1 Yeeeessss Justin; I can finally safety for you.
2 … including a couple of me being… quite-a-dork.
mozilla, planetmoz
blahblahblah | 1 Comment »
V52