Weekly Engineering Newsletter 2011-04-21

[Asa Dotzler]

Hey everyone! I'm a day late, but I'm making up for it with a
crazy-awesome issue 14 of the Weekly Engineering Newsletter: everything
you need to know about engineering at Mozilla in less than 500 words.

OK Let's GO!

*What You Need to Know Right Now*

The merge forward to Aurora 6 and the beginning of Firefox 7 work is
only 33 days away.

*Planning Update*

Development has been very active on mozilla-central since we merged
forward to Aurora a little more than a week ago, with engineers landing
over 200 fixes http://bit.ly/h0lOkU including our number one topcrash on
Mac and some beautiful UI clean-up work for the location bar's identity
block.

The release team is meeting three times a week to triage work for the
Aurora 5.0a2 branch. Meetings happen Tuesdays & Thursdays from 2:00 PM
to 3:00 PM and Wednesdays from 11:30 am to 12:00 PM (all times Pacific)

If you know of a bug that the release team should be aware of for
Firefox 5, please nominate it with the tracking-firefox5? bug flag and a
comment letting the team know why this is important for Firefox 5.

If you have a fix that you believe should land on Aurora, nominate it
with the approval-mozilla-aurora? attachment flag. Be sure to include
any information, like user benefits, risk of the patch, etc. that will
help the team evaluate that change in the Aurora context.

Oh, and if you really want to advocate for a particular bug or fix, feel
free to join the team for part or all of the scheduled triage meetings.
Meeting information can be found at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Aurora

Finally, the Beta (5.0) repo and automation are set up and we are
currently working through a plan to test the upgrade path and the
channel changer mechanics ahead of the official merge forward to Beta.

*Must Read Blogs & News*

Jason Orendorff — How to fix a bug, episode 434494, part 1 & 2
https://blog.mozilla.com/jorendorff/2011/04/18/how-to-fix-a-bug-episode-434494-part-1/
http://blog.mozilla.com/jorendorff/2011/04/20/how-to-fix-a-bug-episode-434494-part-2/

Johnathan Nightingale — Deliberacy
http://blog.johnath.com/2011/04/19/deliberacy/

John O'Duinn — Aurora – now with localization!
http://oduinn.com/blog/2011/04/18/aurora-now-with-localization/

Mozilla Add-ons Blog — Add-on Compatibility & Rapid Releases
http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibility-rapid-releases/

Margaret Leibovic — Identity Block Uplift
http://blog.margaretleibovic.com/post/4769940235

David Baron — CSS Animations
http://dbaron.org/log/20110419-animations

Joel Maher — Some notes about adding new tests to talos
http://elvis314.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/some-notes-about-adding-new-tests-to-talos/

*A Taste of Awesome*

The ever-inspiring Sean Martell has a gorgeous desktop wallpaper and
Firefox Persona that he's giving away for free! ;) You know you want it
so get it today.
http://blog.seanmartell.com/2011/04/21/nightly-and-aurora-space-quest-goodies/

[Lukas Blakk]

tl;dr - Please do not push to try for the next two hours since the
upload location is about to change and pushes in this window will get
split up.

The Details:

We're landing a fix for
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650282 to rename everything
about Try to just that: "Try" instead of the current combinations of
"Tryserver and MozillaTry" this affects the upload location for your
builds (and thus, where the tests pull from) which will now be:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/try-builds/

Once this landing is completed, a quick renaming in Graphserver is taken
care of in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651513, and tbpl
is updated in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651524
everything should return to normal with the graphserver posts from tests
working again.

Thanks for your patience.

Lukas

[Shawn Wilsher]

On 4/22/2011 10:08 AM, Lukas Blakk wrote:
> We're landing a fix for
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650282 to rename everything
> about Try to just that: "Try" instead of the current combinations of
> "Tryserver and MozillaTry" this affects the upload location for your
> builds (and thus, where the tests pull from) which will now be:
>
> ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/try-builds/
>
> Once this landing is completed, a quick renaming in Graphserver is taken
> care of in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651513, and tbpl
> is updated in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651524
> everything should return to normal with the graphserver posts from tests
> working again.

Did this need to happen today with no forward notice? It's now causing
the try server to be down for about four hours, which is rather unfortunate.

Cheers,

Shawn