I think it's awesome to get this kind of summary on a weekly basis.
Thanks for doing this!
On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Asa Dotzler <a
...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone and welcome to the first issue of the Weekly Engineering
> Newsletter, where each week I'll distill all of the most important
> engineering information and deliver it to you all in one easily digested
> morsel.
> I'm pulling content from all of the meetings you weren't able to attend, the
> wild west of planet.mozilla.org, conversations with engineers and project
> leads, and anywhere else that's relevant to Mozilla's current engineering
> focus.
> I look forward to working with you all to make this newsletter your go-to
> source for what's important in Mozilla engineering so please don't hesitate
> to email me directly at asa at mozilla dot org if you've got questions or
> suggestions.
> OK. Let's go!
> *Planning Update*
> Mozilla reached another great milestone last Friday with the release of
> Firefox 4's ninth beta. Reactions from our testing community and the press
> have been the best yet for any of our betas, with many champing at the bit
> to see a release in February.
> The schedule for Beta 10 has not been finalized. The planning team has
> proposed a Friday (2011-01-21) code freeze and is waiting to hear from the
> Firefox and Platform leads to see if that's gonna work. There are over 90!
> hard blocker fixes that have happened since we froze for beta 9 and those
> fixes need to get out into testing sooner rather than later.
> We currently stand at 225 soft blockers and 97 hard blockers. Hard blockers
> are _the_ priority for all of Mozilla engineering right now.
> If you've finished up with your hard blockers, please take a look at the
> full hard blocker buglist, check with your colleagues, and check the review
> queue to see if there are other hard blocker bugs you can help move forward.
> Then dive into those soft blockers.
> (If you see a bug marked soft blocker that you believe should be a hard
> blocker, the process for communicating that is to remove "soft" from the
> status whiteboard and make your case for why it should be a hard blocker in
> a bug comment.)
> We're seeing a number of Flash-related stability issues, so if you've
> disabled Flash player, please help out by turning it back on so we can
> increase the coverage there. Flash Player is starting to emerge as a ship
> risk so we need all the help we can getting on top of it.
> *Must Read Blogs & News*
> Johnathan Nightingale: It’s Almost Ready
> http://blog.johnath.com/2011/01/13/its-almost-ready/
> Mozilla Hacks: Firefox 4 Beta 9 – a huge pile of awesome
> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/01/firefox-4-beta-9-a-huge-pile-of-awe...
> Gandalf: Hard Blocker count extension
> http://diary.braniecki.net/2011/01/19/hard-blockers-counter-0-8-with-...
> Sean Michael Kerner: Firefox 4 Beta 9 now out fixing 661 bugs
> http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2011/01/firefox-4-beta-9-now-out...
> *A Taste of Awesome*
> One week ago, the Firefox 4 beta audience surpassed 2 million ADUs.
> Awesome to some, I've got the answer to the often asked question: "will we
> have another beta after this one?" and the answer comes in the form of
> another question: "are there any open bugs marked blocking betaN+" Those are
> bugs that need a beta test cycle. If we've still got 'em, we've still got
> anther beta.
> *Closing Remarks* - This week's words of wisdom come from Brendan Eich:
> "There's a paradox with doing releases when you get in the end game. You're
> looking at blocker lists and they seem to have too many bugs and you think
> 'we have to get this to zero.'
> "But you can't do it. Michael Toy at Netscape long ago coined the phrase
> 'Zarro Boogs' because you don't really get to zero. You do a touch and go
> and then you can release and people get all this benefit of Firefox 4
> instead of 3.6. That's what we need to do.
> "Some of those blockers are, and I have some, soft – in the sense that
> they're edge cases. We probably can wait on those. We're not going to kick
> them out yet because if we have the parallel bandwidth of all our great
> people and the volunteer community too where we have volunteers doing some
> of this work, we'll take a fix if it's an additive and safe fix.
> "But at some point we have to stop that. I think we're past that point and
> I'm going to treat my bugs accordingly and I encourage everyone here to do
> that.
> "Cast a colder eye on your blockers. Some of them can wait for a dot release
> or Firefox 5 that I do believe will be only months after 4 comes out. We are
> going to a fast release cycle. It serves our users better. To do that we
> have to get this touch and go done with Firefox 4.
> "So get your blocker lists down. We need some slack in the list for
> late-breaking regressions that we didn't know were bad at the time or
> actually came in late that we need to fix."
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