We're in the middle of a release wrap-up and I'm pretty busy with that but it also feels like an ideal time to bring up this topic.
With literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code changing every cycle, it's clear that there's a lot of engineering and testing work that goes into every Mozilla release. You can see this by looking over one of the "rough changelogs" that I create for each release (Mozilla 1.7, for example.)
What a lot of people don't know is that there's also a fair amount of (I hate this word) management that goes into pulling everything together for a release. On the Mozilla projects, much of that falls onto the shoulders of drivers@mozilla.org.
Drivers was created several years ago "to drive developers looking to help toward bugs needing assistance in a timely fashion, to moderate risk, and to aid commercial projects based on Mozilla in managing their product releases."
I've been a member of that group since its formation back in 2000. One of the areas I'm most involved with drivers is releases and in the last 4 years I've had my hand in about 65 Mozilla application suite releases, almost 20 Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox releases and about half a dozen Thunderbird releases.
On several occasions I've tried to write up a good blog post about what it takes to make our releases happen but have never finished. So this time, rather than try to put it into a post, I thought I'd just open it up to questions and see what you want to know about the process.
I'll read all of the questions here and then in a follow-up post, attempt to answer them and in doing so, hopefully give you all a better picture of our release process.
