For some reason1, a friend and I had this ongoing joke about flying to beautiful, beautiful Modesto together. This weekend, we finally got around to doing it. It was an interesting flight. On the way out, visibility was all over the map in the central valley, as there was a forest fire… “somewhere.”2 We were Read More
Last night, my blog became a bit of a lightning rod1, as readers from Slashdot poured in to tell us exactly what they think of how we release software. I just finished reviewing the hundred-some comments2, and I think I’ve realized four things: People who have managed and worked with large releases of open source Read More
I mentioned this in today’s Project Meeting, and now it’s come up in the newsgroups. Normally, I’d take the time to write up a more in-depth explanation, but since my schedule is… uh… “hectic” right now, I’ll just say this: No, we have. Not. Released. Firefox. 2. Yet. When people link to bits directly on Read More
Thunderbird continues to amaze me.1 One feature that I hadn’t started using until a couple of weeks ago was Thunderbird’s built-in spam detection. I mostly didn’t use it because it looked like it never worked. It didn’t mark anything as spam, and I thought “Well, this is a crappy filter.” It turns out that I Read More
Last time I did 2.0 release candidate localization builds, I ran into a problem with the tagging and checkout. For various reasons, we only tag the locales that we ship for a particular release with the _RELEASE tag. During the build, client.mk checks out every locale specified in all-locales. This has worked beautifully for the Read More
Despite the fact that I have a PowerBook [for work], and use a PowerBook [for work], I’m no fan of Apple. I’ve got a lot of complaints, really… but I think they all boil down to disagreement with one of the company’s values: aesthetics above… well… anything and everything else. This is a constant pain Read More
While sitting here, waiting for the Firefox 2.0 RC 2 candidates to finish compiling (go Win32 SpeedRacer!!), I started thinking about that post I wrote (has it already been?!) two weeks ago. After re-reading it, I fired up Google to scour the blogosphere to see if anyone else is writing about this stuff. “Build/Release Engineering Read More