Heads up: retiring the "early beta" period

[Chris Peterson]

In an effort to make Beta builds more representative of release candidate builds and avoid functionality appearing and then disappearing during the Beta cycle, the Release Management team will be retiring the “early” and “late” beta periods (Beta cycle weeks 1–2 and 3–4, respectively).

To prepare, we ask that teams:

1. Audit your code’s use of the EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER macro.

2. Replace your code’s use of EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER with:

1. NIGHTLY_BUILD, if the functionality is ready for QA and user testing but not release

2. or (NIGHTLY_BUILD || MOZ_DEV_EDITION), if the functionality needs more user testing beyond Nightly but isn’t ready for release. Warning: having different functionality in DevEdition and Beta will complicate testing. You should consider when (or if) you will eventually ship this functionality.

3. or enable by default, if the functionality is ready to ride the trains to Release.

Searchfox search:

https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/search?q=EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER&case=true

Here’s a meta bug about early beta that teams can link their bugs to:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2051729 

Deadline: August 17, when Nightly 155 merges to Beta

In Beta 155+, EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER will be redefined as NIGHTLY_BUILD. If a team doesn’t audit their use of EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER, we don’t expect anything to break, but the functionality will no longer be enabled in early Beta 155+. Later, the EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER macro will be removed, search-and-replaced with NIGHTLY_BUILD.