Mulet - New desktop runtime

[Alexandre poirot]

Gaia and Gecko developers,

Mulet builds are finally available:
  http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/b2g/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/
  (Look for firefox-* packages)

Mulet is meant to merge all existing runtimes currently available on desktop to run Gaia.
It will replace b2g-desktop and the special Firefox nightly mode that is currently broken.
The Fx OS simulator addon is also going to be based on top of it.

There is nothing special to do in order to use it.
Just build a gaia profile with make (both DEBUG and non-DEBUG profile work).
and then run it with this profile:

  $ cd ~/gaia
  $ make
  $ ~/mulet/firefox-bin -profile profile/

(So far it doesn't come with a builtin gaia profile, so you have to build and pass one)

The main goal is to have a single environment to run Gaia on desktop,
while ensuring we have the most convenient way to work on Gaia.
The main advantage compared to b2g desktop is that you get an easy access
to all devtools when running Gaia.
And the improvement compared to the Firefox nightly support
is that it isn't made of many hacks, while being covered by our Continuous Integration tools (Treeherder).
Also all APIs that currently work on b2g desktop are meant to work on Mulet.
So please report anything that doesn't work on mulet _whereas it currently works on b2g desktop_:
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox%20OS&component=Runtime
  And please cc me (:ochameau)

Next steps are:
- gather feedback on Mulet stability/usability for gaia development,

- run all CI tests currently running on b2g-desktop: Gaia unit/ui/integration/linter tests as well as Reftests. (All test suites can already be run locally against mulet, via RUNTIME env variable)

- ensure that all test suites are green on mulet,

- finally, once previous steps are done, deprecate b2g desktop in favor of mulet.

I'll try to give a quick presentation of Mulet during today's gaia meeting:
  https://etherpad.mozilla.org/gaia-meeting-notes

See the wiki page for futher reference:
  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mulet

++

Alex

[Kumar Rishav]

Great news :)
It will be very helpful now.
@chris : It will be great if instructions to run Gaia get updated on MDN too.

Thanks to all who worked on this new tool. Now Gaia contributor can resume their work.

Cheers

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[Chris Mills]

This is my next task, don’t you worry!

Chris Mills
Senior tech writer || Mozilla
developer.mozilla.org || MDN
cmi...@mozilla.com || @chrisdavidmills

[Jonas Sicking]

Yay! This is super awesome!

I'd definitely encourage both Gaia and Gecko developers to start using
and provide feedback.

/ Jonas

[Dietrich Ayala]

Thanks Alexandre and all the other people who helped on Mulet!

A couple of questions:

* Does it receive nightly updates yet?

* Are there multiple channels? If so, are the channels for FxOS releases or Gecko releases? Having channels (and their names) be per FxOS releases might help people to easily know what version they're developing against.

* Will it be permanently named Mulet, or should we call it FirefoxOS Developer Edition like we're doing with Aurora right now? (These things REALLY help lower the barriers to entry for new contributors)

* Can we change the executable name to whatever the above decision is, because "Firefox" when it's not really Firefox is going to be confusing to new developers. Eg, a screenshot of the Mulet installation experience on Mac - also see an actual Firefox Nightly in that dir :)



​

[Dietrich Ayala]

Filed some issues

* Fonts not correct on Mac - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1094099

* Connections warning on startup on Mac - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1094100

[Kumar Rishav]

Hi

I am trying to run the mulet but it not running. I followed these (working on linux):

1. downloaded the tar file (firefox-*) from latest-mozilla-central, then extracted it. (it's in my mulet folder)

2. now go to gaia: 
    cd gaia

    make
then:
opensource@opensource:~/firefoxos/gaia$ /home/opensource/mulet/firefox/firefox-bin -profile /home/opensource/firefoxos/gaia/profile

After running it , it opens firefox browser and in terminal it show this error:
opensource@opensource:~/firefoxos/gaia$ /home/opensource/mulet/firefox/firefox-bin -profile /home/opensource/firefoxos/gaia/profile

(process:12389): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_slice_set_config: assertion 'sys_page_size == 0' failed
opensource@opensource:~/firefoxos/gaia$

Please help

Thanks

    

--

Kumar Rishav

Mozilla Representative - ReMo Mozilla Reps

[Alexandre poirot]

Kumar,

Are you using a 64bits build for your linux and have a 64bits cpu?

Today, we only provide 64bits builds for mulet so it won't work on 32b.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/b2g/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/firefox-36.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

[Kumar Rishav]

Yes I am using  64bits build  and have a 64bits cpu.

I downloaded same tar.bz2 file

[Julien Wajsberg]

Le 05/11/2014 13:51, Kumar Rishav a écrit :
> Hi
>
> I am trying to run the mulet but it not running. I followed these
> (working on linux):
> 1. downloaded the tar file (firefox-*) from latest-mozilla-central,
> then extracted it. (it's in my mulet folder)
> 2. now go to gaia:
> cd gaia
> make

Aren't we supposed to use "DEBUG=1 DESKTOP=0" profiles for mulet just
like we used to for B2G Desktop?
Or are non-debug builds supported too?

[Alexandre poirot]

Mulet supports non-debug builds (just "make") and debug builds without nightly helpers ("DEBUG=1 DESKTOP=0 make".

[Alexandre poirot]

Kumar,

I think you are hiting following crash - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=833117

I don't know why this is still not fixed... but it's not mulet specific. Firefox should crash as well.

[Kumar Rishav]

Alexandre,

But firefox is not crashing at all. Why this error is coming on linux while it's working fine on mac (as per dietrich comment's).

Any solution/alternative for this.

​

[Alexandre Lissy]

Le 05/11/2014 14:15, Julien Wajsberg a écrit :
> Le 05/11/2014 13:51, Kumar Rishav a écrit :
>> Hi
>>
>> I am trying to run the mulet but it not running. I followed these
>> (working on linux):
>> 1. downloaded the tar file (firefox-*) from latest-mozilla-central,
>> then extracted it. (it's in my mulet folder)
>> 2. now go to gaia:
>> cd gaia
>> make
>
> Aren't we supposed to use "DEBUG=1 DESKTOP=0" profiles for mulet just
> like we used to for B2G Desktop?
> Or are non-debug builds supported too?

Non debug build should work.

>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> dev-b2g mailing list
> dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
>

[Chris Mills]

Ok - I’ve got this to work! Great work guys.

However, I’ve got one worry about Mulet: one of the main great things about loading Gaia in Desktop Nightly, as it used to work, was that if you loaded your debug profile in desktop firefox, you could then load each app at an individual URL, using that HTTPD server hack. So then you could make changes to the apps code inside Gaia and just refresh the browser tab to see the changes instantly.

On Mulet, this doesn’t seem to work, so instead when you make a change to a Gaia app it seems to me that you’ve got to rebuild your profile and reopen Mulet each time you want to see your change running, which really isn’t great.

Is there a better way to do things than this?

Chris Mills
Senior tech writer || Mozilla
developer.mozilla.org || MDN
cmi...@mozilla.com || @chrisdavidmills

[Alexandre poirot]

Chris,

Keep in mind this is the early days for mulet and various things may be broken that's why I need feedback from you all!

Thanks for taking time to test it!!

Debug profile can't work on mulet with Firefox nightly helpers turned on.

So you have to build gaia profile with DEBUG=1 DESKTOP=0 make.

I'm wondering, if, now that mulet is available, and Firefox nightly mode is broken, we can just get rid of these helpers??

Can you confirm things work as you expect with such profile?

[Chris Mills]

> On 5 Nov 2014, at 16:43, Alexandre poirot <poiro...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Chris,
> Keep in mind this is the early days for mulet and various things may be broken that's why I need feedback from you all!

Ummm, yeah, sorry for sounding so grumpy about it. That came out a bit wrong.

> Thanks for taking time to test it!!
> Debug profile can't work on mulet with Firefox nightly helpers turned on.
> So you have to build gaia profile with DEBUG=1 DESKTOP=0 make.

This is the exact build instruction I used to make my profile-debug, so we are on the same page there.

> I'm wondering, if, now that mulet is available, and Firefox nightly mode is broken, we can just get rid of these helpers??
>
> Can you confirm things work as you expect with such profile?

Confirmed - run with a DEBUG=1 DESKTOP=0 make profile, the Mulet starts up fine, and works as expected (albeit not with the behaviour I was moaning about below ;-) )

[Eitan Isaacson]

I think we need to take out all the firefox helpers from DESKTOP=1, but keep some things, like the additional-extensions downloader. We use it currently to install the screen reader simulator. Looks like that extension doesn't work out of the box with Mulet, but I AM SO EXCITED to get that working again after Gaia in Firefox broke.

On 11/05/2014 08:43 AM, Alexandre poirot wrote:

Chris,

Keep in mind this is the early days for mulet and various things may be broken that's why I need feedback from you all!

Thanks for taking time to test it!!

Debug profile can't work on mulet with Firefox nightly helpers turned on.

So you have to build gaia profile with DEBUG=1 DESKTOP=0 make.

I'm wondering, if, now that mulet is available, and Firefox nightly mode is broken, we can just get rid of these helpers??

Can you confirm things work as you expect with such profile?

[Kevin Grandon]

The idea of the DESKTOP=1 helpers was that they provide some basic API shims that were not available on Firefox Nightly before. I am sure that there are still some shims that we want to mock in the new simulator, we should probably just go through and check them one by one.

For now though, it would be pretty simple to stop setting DESKTOP=1 when DEBUG is set if it's breaking things. Do we need to do this?

Best,
Kevin

[an]

I can run Mulet with 2.1 and 2.2 but not with 2.0 for some reason it doesn't show the apps just the collections. Is there any magic I must do to get 2.0 working in Mulet?

[an]

Looks like a very dificult issue alex p so I'll give you some more time to answer my post. BTW you mention "- gather feedback on Mulet stability/usability for gaia development" can you at least acknowledge the problem I mentioned with gaia 2.0?

[Alexandre poirot]

Mulet only works for 2.2 branch, i.e. master branches.

We don't plan to support older versions, you will have to continue using b2g desktop for them.

If there is some little breakage in 2.1 we might uplift some patches,
but unfortunately it is too late for 2.0 and the amount of patches to make it work on this branch is too big.

Please do not hesitate to report anything wrong/suspicious happening on master branches.

2014-12-10 21:22 GMT+01:00 an <novac...@gmail.com>:

On Sunday, December 7, 2014 10:29:35 PM UTC+2, an wrote:

Looks like a very dificult issue alex p so I'll give you some more time to answer my post. BTW you mention "- gather feedback on Mulet stability/usability for gaia development" can you at least acknowledge the problem I mentioned with gaia 2.0?