June 2005
Tuesday 14 June 2005
- Build infrastructure in-place for trunk localizations - Last week I finished fine-tuning the localization (l10n) build systems to get Fx-Trunk and Tb-Trunk building on Windows, Mac, and Linux as expected. Now that the build infrastructure is in-place for nightly trunk l10n builds on these platforms, most of the remaining work will be happening in the mozilla/ and l10n/ modules themselves. If you'd like to watch what goes into the process of enabling from-CVS nightly builds and releases for 30+ localizations of world-class products like Firefox and Thunderbird, the following links will be helpful. Firefox nightly builds build status Thunderbird tracking bug nightly builds build status... (12:31 | 1 Comments)
Tuesday 7 June 2005
- Software update's bright future - Darin and Ben have been working hard on a revised software update user experience and, now, a decent chunk of that initial work has landed on the trunk. Darin has a great demo he's been showing of the client downloading updates in the background and applying them after a restart. Ben has a screenshot of the GUI for one scenario that could happen during update. The plan right now is to bang out the larger issues currently facing the code, address build system work to create the complete update packages of nightly builds, focus on server work to create the update data the clients request (telling them whether or not an update exists), then turn our attention to creating a process for making partial updates based on previous builds. It's our intention to have an initial take on most of this work completed as a part of the Deer Park Alpha 2 milestone. Bettering software update is a "must ship" deliverable for Deer Park and the strides Ben, Darin, and company have made prove it.... (18:10 | 5 Comments)
Monday 6 June 2005
- Making the Talkback client build more robust against server failure - Over the last couple of months we've run into our fair share of issues with the Talkback client not being included in various builds. Whenever the Talkback servers hiccupped, build systems would feel that pain. While keeping the Talkback servers in steady shape is an on-going effort (Jay, our Talkback expert, can attest), the Talkback client going missing from these builds was an ugly side-effect which would bite us at any time -- whether during a nightly release build or a release respin. The result being that we would need to respin the affected builds again, delaying everyone's work further. Peering into the mysteries of the Talkback server some time ago, we found we could cut the servers out of the loop and generate the necessary parts for the Talkback client without any server interaction at all. The main thing holding us back was that we had no time to implement and test the changes. Last week offered an opportune time to make such a big change to the build process, having just completed our release of Firefox and Thunderbird 1.1a1. As of noon last Saturday, all release builds including the Talkback client that are built from the trunk, the Mozilla 1.7 branch, and the Aviary 1.0 and 1.0.1 branches no longer require interacting with the Talkback server to build the client. While the client build can break and has broken before for other reasons (eg, API changes in the core Mozilla code), the most common cause of the client breakage in our nightly builds has now been resolved. I flipped the switch on this but couldn't have done it without Shiva T. and Jay. Thanks to Shiva for his pointers on what to look out for when generating the master.ini templates and Jay for his verification work that the Talkback client still functions as expected after the changes were made.... (17:13 | 3 Comments)
Sunday 5 June 2005
- Experimental Tinderbox - I've gotten favourable responses on what I've labelled Tinderbox's experimental version. Enough so that I've decided to push forward on getting my changes into the main scripts. The first step: complete the work I started on the experimental view. I finished that up tonight while Firefly played in the background. Next step: clean up and modularize the changes. Shiny.... (02:38 | 10 Comments)