Work Week Recap
It was a fun work week in Mountain View. Despite the large number of toys available in the main area of Building K, there was a tremendous amount of work getting done on Firefox 3. Beta 3 freeze occurred (and continues) through stalwart sheriffing and sheer force of will, pushing a steady stream of patches being into the tree in preparation for its release. Mostly, I tried to stay out of everyone’s way.
On the test development and automation end of things, we had some productive meetings to set our direction for the next few months. We’re going to put some fast-cycling talos machines up to take over from the aging, test-only tinderboxes that have been keeping Rob Helmer up at night. These should come into being in the next couple of weeks and we’ll run them in parallel during the bake-in period to compare the numbers.
I also had the opportunity to sit down with Bob Clary and bring up a couple more machines for the JavaScript Testing project, aka “Sisyphus“. You can visit them on the MozillaTest tree on the tinderbox server — they’re the ones with “js test” in the title and are currently all orange due to tinderbox error parsing funniness. Over the next little while we’ll bring up the remaining platform (Mac OS X Intel) and fix up the displays so they’re only orange when they’re supposed to be orange.
But wait! There’s more! We’re also going to be beefing up the unittest farm with some redundant machinery. Each platform will become part of a triadic set similar to the triples of machines we have running talos tests. This is the first phase in building in some parallelization and error checking into these machines in an attempt to cut down on cycle time and improve reliability.
Finally, Chris Cooper improved the clobber support across all three platforms and applied a little special sauce on the Windows box that should dramatically reduce the number of stuck processes under Mozilla-build.
