The Changing of the Guard
Almost four weeks ago now1, dbaron took some time and separated out the various guts of the old Mozilla tools module, and divvied the contents of the directory2 into two new Mozilla modules: a Build & Release Tools module and a Code Analysis and Debugging Tools module.
I wanted to call this change out, because I think it’s a step in the right direction, for a lot of reasons; both of these new modules have seen a lot more activity in the last 2-3 years and I think it really helps to separate them out from a code management standpoint, but also from the standpoint of the way we think about these sets of tools: the guts of any organization’s build/release infrastructure and analysis/debugging tools should be first-rate citizens, and this change helps to frame the way those parts of the code are thought about.
So, thank you, dbaron; it’s been a long time coming, and I appreciate you taking the time to sort that goop of code all out into [more] logical units.
A couple of days after the announcement, I brought up the fact that with Rob Helmer’s announcement, the Build & Release module would not have anyone at Mozilla Corporation who could offer reviews for the module, given that rhelmer, Chase and myself were listed as the owners, and there weren’t any peers yet.
This obviously makes little-to-no sense.
After a lively discussion about how to best remedy that, I also wanted to note that long-time Mozilla community member Nick Thomas3 is the new module owner for the Build/Release Tools module, with Chase, Rob Helmer, and myself staying around as peers.
Coop was also added as a module peer, whose omission was, let’s face it, somewhat ludicrous4. I’m happy to see that got corrected as well.
Congratulations, Nick; you follow a long line of Mozilla Build Engineers, and I know you’re going to [continue to] hit it out of the ballpark.
Let me know where to send the bottle of scotch.
_____________________
1 Wow… on my birthday, no less! What a present!
2 which had mostly become an “island of misfit code”
3 also known as the “Build Engineer Formerly Known as CF”
4 No one escapes Mozilla Build/Release, Coop. No one.
I assume bugs about the former set go somewhere in the mozilla.org product (at least some of those tools look like they have components there), but is there a product/component for bugs about any of the tools in the latter set?
@Smokey:
That’s a good question; John O’Duinn recently did a bunch of bmo component reorganization (which was rumored to be based on how MoCo IT structured their components), so before, stuff used to go in mozilla.org:Build & Release, but that component has been split and renamed into Release Engineering, Release Engineering:Future, and Release Engineering:Maintenance.
I’m not 100% sure what the difference between Release Engineering:Future and Release Engineering with a Target Milestone of “future” (which does not exist, I guess?) would be. That would be a great question for joduinn or (better yet) Nick!