chase's blog

Slowly but surely I've been weaving my way through the Tinderbox, Bonsai, and LXR code and straightening out any parts that seem crooked. I've fixed some regressions around the layout of usernames on Tinderbox pages which was giving bad links to their commit info, properly URL-escaped committer names (so we can see what people with '+' in their usernames have changed), and, with the proper encouragement, implemented the equivalent of an "I'm feeling lucky" search for file find in LXR. (If you have an LXR keyword set up for file searching append '&lucky=1'. Hi Ben!)

I can't leave out Bonsai, though, due to the amount of time I've spent getting a new installation enabled for l10n work. Packaging was never done for this tool, which means that if the person standing up a new instance isn't familiar with it, this can be pretty challenging. But the challenge is good because it points out one area in particular that the tool needs work.

I'm putting a lot of thought into how tools like these are used on the Mozilla project and how they could be made better. What works and what doesn't, strengthening them while at the same time making them more flexible. They are essential for our work and could prove just as invaluable to those projects which aren't using them already.

As a mini-project I dove into Tinderbox and implemented a (more factual) layout of build system progress. Some of you who are familiar with Tinderbox 2 may have seen a similar layout in that tool. Here you can see this feature implemented in a production Tinderbox environment.

Taken a close look at Tinderbox 3 and IMO there's goodness there that we should glean into our production services. Haven't done a close review of Tinderbox 2 but it's on my (amazingly long) list of things to-do.

If you have any suggestions for changes that would make working with Tinderbox, Bonsai, and LXR easier for you, send an email to me. I want to hear from you!