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April 25, 2004

Branch Life

Now that we're going to be living on a branch for a fairly long period of time (up until Firefox 1.0 - late summer) with development and testing continuing on the trunk, we need to rethink the Tinderbox setup.

What I'm thinking about is something like this. For each platform:

  • A slower tinderbox to do an alternating cycle branch/trunk clobber build and release binaries using the post-mozilla-rel script. This can be the only branch tinderbox if necessary - speed isn't as important here since the branch isn't taking as many checkins, and the trunk speed isn't as important because we'll also have
  • A faster tinderbox to do a trunk depend build. I want to get the newest and fastest hardware on the Firefox trunk build page to get people watching it.

So, as usual we have hundreds of Linux machines so that shouldn't be a problem. After acquiring Moco I now have two Windows machines (the other is Beast). I don't know which will be doing what yet... Beast may become our depend build since it's got higher performance components and a faster clock rate. For Mac right now we have Imola, an 867MHz Quicksilver G4 - I'd like to get that doing the alternating cycle and have the 1.6GHz G5 that chofmann bought recently for smoketesting become the trunk depend tinderbox.

Posted by ben at April 25, 2004 6:18 PM

Comments

What exactly is the difference between depend and clobber??

Posted by: Doug at April 26, 2004 2:55 PM

Shamelessly borrowed from
http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~callahan/anatomy/Carvell_Tinderbox1.ppt

Clbr: "Clobber" builds are checked out and compiled from scratch.

Dep: "Depend" builds are updated and rebuilt in the same directory, and incrementally rebuilt.

"depend" builds complete faster, but "clobber" is good to make sure dependencies are right.

Posted by: Kevin Brosnan at April 26, 2004 4:18 PM

I don't understand a word what Ben is saying but I think it's so cool!

Posted by: angelday at April 29, 2004 4:02 PM

I always dow Clobber builds becasue, well... my depends builds ALWAYS fail... whats the best way to do depends builds... while we are on the subject.

Posted by: Samual Icky at May 1, 2004 3:04 PM

Are computers a donation that the foundation could use for creating Mac builds? I have no technical knowledge on how to create a build, but I may have access to some computers that would at least be as good as the specs you mentioned. Just wondering what the needs are.

Posted by: tim at May 3, 2004 11:37 AM

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