Nightly builds and QA
Jonathan Watt
I'm hoping MoCo can put some resources on making the following better.
I'm concerned about the hoops potential testers have to jump through to run
nightly builds so they can provide relevant bugs. I believe our instructions
should be as simple as:
Install a nighly from <path> when you test and file bugs. Make sure
the nighly you file bugs on isn't much more than two weeks old.
Possibly followed by the explanation:
This makes sure you don't waste time filing bugs that are already
fixed, and that the developers can spend more time developing
instead of reading and closing those bug reports.
I've just explained this again to another SVG content author who wanted to file
some casual bugs to help us improve our support. Unfortunately I also had to
explain other stuff, help them (unsuccessfully, because they gave up) to get
that other stuff working, and have it highlighted to me *again* just how
off-putting this other stuff is to getting casual users to file relevant bugs
against the trunk.
The problem is:
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People want to be able to use their stable release for their day to day
browsing. To find a bug, they *don't* want to have to close down all their
Firefox 1.5 windows and tabs so they can fire up their nightly build. They want
to be able to just fire up their nightly, test, file a bug, close, and go back
to their Firefox 1.5 windows.
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Currently they can't do that. They must:
* set up a new profile so they don't risk data loss by running latest
stable release and trunk on the same profile. (How do you get the
profile manager up? What? Command line? Command line arguments?
What are they? Oh, I don't want to have to choose a profile every
time I start Moz!)
* Mess around with MOZ_NO_REMOTE somehow. (How do you use it so it doesn't
mess with how your stable release build works? Use a batch file to launch
the nightly so it can set it there? What are batch files? Why isn't my
batch file working?)
It would be wonderful if these weren't issues. If perhaps moz would by default
install nightlies to a path that is different to the path release builds install
to. If it would by default create a separate nightly profile and use that
without asking. If nightlies by default would act as if MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1.
I guess these changes would require a lot of work, and I'm not currently sure
how to file bugs on this. However, I think this would be a very positive step to
reducing developer/tester frustration (installing a nighly and finding it has
nuked your profile is *very* frustrating) and time wasted, and ensuring that we
get less DUPs and more helpful feedback.
Thoughts?
Jonathan
Axel Hecht
store the profile under Mozilla/Firefox-debug.
We may be able do a tad more build magic to do that by default.
But that'd be a per-product decision, so that discussion should probably
be started in mda.firefox and/or thunderbird.
Axel