preed's blah-blah-blahg

Just a heads up that in general, Mac coverage may be spotty over the next couple of days. We're finally getting around to bug 327092, the infamous "Upgrade all the Macs so they can build universal binary builds"-bug.

atlantia and columbia will be the first two to get the OS, software, and hardware—all new Mac build machines will be RAID1'ed now—upgrades.

This should not effect core-product nightly base builds, i.e. Firefox Trunk, 1.8 and 1.8.0 will still be available, as will Thunderbird 1.8 and 1.8.0.

Build that will be affected include XULRunner Mac builds and various l10n builds.

We'll work as quickly as possible to get them back online as quickly as possible. This work should cause the cycle time, currently as high as some 4-odd hours, down to something more reasonable.

Posted by preed at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've starting taking some time to go through the open build@mozilla-org.bugs list. The goal is to make the list reflect reality because, as most of you know, a list with over 100 bugs on it, all assigned to the same "person" is.. well... basically meaningless.

There's more work to do, but I got the list down below 100 bugs, down from 150ish or so.

Anyway, by far the most exciting part of the session was dealing with my lowest Bugzilla bug number evar, bug 11127: "Build issues for external developers."

Opened October 2nd of 1999, it reported that CVS is too slow (and we should provide rsync feeds to the source), NSPR debugging variables didn't make sense, nmake was too slow, and "the build system is insufficiently documented."

Given that CVS is now wicked fast, we don't use nmake for anything anymore, and... well... something never change I guess, I RESOLVED it FIXED.

(Seriously though, I mentioned Devmo in the resolving comment; there's tons of great stuff on there and wiki.m.o about the build system and its architecture; there's been a ton of useful work in that area as well.)

I'm going to continue working through the list until it reflects reality, and I've already RESOLVED -> WONTFIXed some bugs.

If I happen to do this to one of your "favorite," pet Build Config bugs, please gently re-open to let me know the error of my ways.¹

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¹ All bugs before 2001 will not be considered for this special offer. They're old and therefore obviously unnecessary.^2
2 Just kidding.

Posted by preed at 6:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With a couple of known exceptions that I'll work through tomorrow, all of the tinderboxen hardware has been successfully moved, migrated, and brought up in the new colo.

I've opened the tree as of about twenty minutes ago.

I fully expect to have missed some details myself on the bringup, so there may be a tinderbox or two missing here and there. If you see something missing, please email build@mozilla.org, or pounce on us in #build. Please be gentle when pouncing.

The bringup did take a bit longer than planned/expected. I really appreciate everyone's patience while we got it worked out, and trudged through all the individual machine bringups (VMs are nice, but they can also be a curse, too!)

Posted by preed at 11:46 AM | Permalink

You heard it here first: the reason net-neutrality is a bad idea, and will never work... is because—are you listening, now?&mdash"[The Internet is] a series of tubes!"

That's right folks. Tubes. "It's not a big truck."

I'm so comforted by the fact that we have informed people like Ted Stevens making policy decisions.

Posted by preed at 1:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a heads up: on the Tinderboxen pages, you may see the build names starting to change from "Release" to "Nightly, a la names like "WINNT 5.0 patrocles Dep Tb-Release" to names like "MacOSX Darwin 8.7.0 bm-xserve02 Dep Fx-Nightly."

The reason for this change is to clear up confusion between the tinderboxen that produce nightly builds, and those that produce release builds. Those used to be the same thing, but now, they [can be] separate. This was more of an issue on the maintenance branches, where the "release builds" had to come from "Clbr" tinderboxen, since there already were "Release" tinderboxen, making everyone more confused.

If this breaks anyone's scripts or anything, or if you have questions, please do let me know.

This change will take place slowly as we move tinderboxen around.

Posted by preed at 8:25 PM | Permalink