Firefox 4 Beta 5 : Code Freeze (note: feature freeze moved to Sept 10)

[Mike Beltzner]

followup-to: mozilla.dev.planning

Hey all,

At Tuesday's development meeting [1] we decided to shift feature freeze to September 10th, but still produce a fifth beta milestone based on a code freeze early Monday morning. Developers should plan to have most of the blocking2.0:beta5+ bugs resolved by the end of today (midnight PT) and then use the weekend to stabilize and fix any regressions. The tree's been a little shaky this week, though, so I expect more landings over the weekend than usual.

To accomplish this, my suggestion is that after midnight PT today the mozilla-central tree be closed to *everything* except bugs marked as blocking beta 5, test fixes and bustage fixes:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=blocking2.0:beta5

That should help us focus on driving that blocker list down while keeping the tree quiet.

Component leads should also be triaging that list and aggressively:

- retargeting features that are "almost there" to beta6+, and ensuring they are ready to land early next week,
- cutting features which are unlikely to make any beta given the amount of work left

This latter point will be painful, but is an important thing for us to do if we are to converge on our blocker list in time to ship. Also note that after this freeze passes, we expect a large merge from the JavaScript team on or around September 1st. We'll likely want a quiet tree for that, so again, please plan on landing changes early in the week so that you're not stymied when looking to land later in the week.

cheers,
mike

ps: I am going to be away from the Internet this weekend, so please look to your component and module owners for sage advice!

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2010-08-24

[Axel Hecht]

To clarify by example, should the dev tools patches in
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?changeset=2d1aebfcf1ef
and
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?changeset=db5a555fb4f0
been pushed to b6? They landed twice on Saturday, with new strings and
"feature"s at least in some reading.

Not that I worry about those 18 dev-focused strings, but I'd prefer clarity.

Full query on my pushes app would be
<https://l10n-stage-sj.mozilla.org/pushes/mozilla-central?from=1282996865&until=1283194783&path=locales%2Fen-US>
for just the ones with string changes during the weekend ('til Monday
noon PT)

Oh, see the irony that all string-impact bugs got backed out for failures?

Axel