Power off and recycle the Firefox 3.0 machines
John O'Duinn
1st June 2010 will be a big day for RelEng. In addition to the FF3.6.4
and FF3.5.10 releases, we'll also finally be able to power off the FF3.0
infrastructure. The CVS-based machines listed in bug#554226 have been
supported in production for over 3.5 years, so we'll be sad (and happy!)
to see them go.
After all those years, its quite possible that people are relying on
those machines in ways we do not even know about. Hence this widespread
notice. If you have any reasons these Firefox 3.0 machines should be
left running, please let us know by commenting in bug#554226. After we
power off these machines, they can be restored from tape backup if
needed, but doing that is non-trivial, so should only be considered an
extreme last resort.
What will change:
=================
* No FF3.0.x incremental/depend/hourly builds will be produced.
* No FF3.0.x clobber/nightly builds will be produced.
* No FF3.0.x release builds will be produced.
* The FF3.0 waterfall page will be removed from tinderbox. Specifically,
this page http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=Firefox3.0
will go away as it will be empty.
What will *not* change:
=======================
* Existing FF3.0.x builds would still be available for download from
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
* Existing update offers would still be available. For example:
** FF3.0.14 users can still update to FF3.0.19.
** FF3.0.19 users can still update to latest FF3.6.x release (which is
FF3.6.3 as of this writing).
* Newly revised major update offers, like from FF3.0.19 -> a future
FF3.6.9 release, could still be produced as needed (because these are
produced on the FF3.6.x infrastructure, not on the powered off FF3.0
infrastructure.)
* Any mozilla-1.9.0 machines which are not Firefox specific should
continue to run as usual.
Why do this:
============
* Reuse some of these machines over to production pool-of-slaves or try
pool-of-slaves, where there is more demand
* Reduce manual support workload and systems complexity for RelEng and IT.
* Allows us speed up making changes to infrastructure code, as there's
now no longer a need to special-case and retest FF3.0 specific
situations. As soon as we power off the Thunderbird2.0 machines, we can
stop having to support both cvs *and* Mercurial throughout build automation.
* For the curious, Mozilla's 6month End-of-Life support policy can be
seen here (https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseRoadmap) and is also
mentioned on the Firefox "all-older" download page here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html
If you have any reasons that these Firefox3.0 machines should continue
running, please comment in bug#554226. Now.
Yes, really.
Now.
Thanks
John.