We had some problems on Friday with a Mac checkin for bug 187508. I approved the checkin because it looked like a fairly safe patch that was going to solve one of our most frequently reported Mac issues. Unfortunately, until we got a null check landed, this caused the Mac builds from Friday morning to crash. The fix went in but the next Mac build failed to complete (some build machine issue, I believe.) Mac builds take forever and by the time Chase had the problem sorted out and the next tinderbox cycle completed it was already pretty late in the evening.
We still have a few bugs left on the blocking1.8a6+ list. We've got patches in review for all but one or two of those so we're looking pretty good on the blocker list.
Other than that Mac problem and the remaining blockers, the builds we've been testing (Tracy, Sarah, Marcia, and myself) are feeling good enough to ship as an alpha. As long as we don't find anything new and major or don't see any serious regressions from the remaining blocker bug fixes.
Oh, and I'm still going through the blocker nominations. A quick scan of the summaries and keywords doesn't lead me to believe that we've got a significant number of alpha blockers there. We'll see after I get into reading the full reports (hopefully today and tomorrow).
We are also having some difficulty with talkback and our build systems. Chase and Jay are working on that and will hopefully have it sorted out by Monday.
If you know of any bugs that should block this alpha release, please nominate them. I'm mostly looking for recent regressions -- things that were working in 1.7.x and aren't working on the current trunk builds, as well as any new code that is so broken it would discourage our testing community from pulling down the A6 release and testing it out.
If all goes well, I think we can have this release out early in the week and let our developers move on to Beta work.
Posted by asa at January 8, 2005 01:46 PMI guess I haven't taken into account the alpha-ness of this release with the nominations (which you've rejected all of so far)...
I'm not sure how much of "our community" is going to be testing alpha6 that aren't using seamonkey nightlies - are you going to try and get some Firefox users to try this alpha, for the future benefit of Firefox 1.1? or is there going to be a pre-1.1 Firefox release?
Posted by: michaell on January 8, 2005 03:19 PMmichaell, I appreciate the nominations (a lot!). They're all good bugs that we definitely should get fixed. Thanks for taking the time and I will definitely be chasing some of those early in the beta cycle.
Our 1.8 alphas are getting between 50,000 and 100,000 downloads. Last I checked, that was significantly more than our nightly build downloads.
We'll be doing a pre1.1 Firefox, maybe around beta or branch time. I have to talk to Ben about when we want to do that, but I'm certain we won't ship 1.1 without some more widespread testing of the Firefox product (including the shared Gecko improvements).
Thanks again for the nominations. Without the community help in nominating bugs, my job wouldn't just be harder, it'd be impossible. Really.
--Asa
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on January 8, 2005 03:34 PMSorry... that wasn't supposed to be a complaint about the nominations getting rejected - I did see that you shifted some nominations onto the beta flag. Glad to hear you'll be chasing some of them in the beta cycle. Thanks.
Posted by: michaell on January 8, 2005 04:35 PMHeh, this isin't a bug report. It probably works.
I always laughed with the pre 1.0.. and a few releases after 1.0.. don't know which ones..... that every once and a while in the Bookmarks manager that the "set as personal toolbar" menu option didn't work.
lol, I don't care if other hidious bugs turn up.. as long as that thing stays working I'm happy.
_____
Thanks for mentioning the Burning Edge before. I appreciated your response, and it is exactly what I was looking for.
Also, thanks for the 1.8 A6 update :D
Posted by: larfnarf on January 8, 2005 05:43 PM