Over the course of the day, we filed around 16 bugs, 1 of which was deemed invalid (Other Component, Weave), and 8 of those remaining were fixed since then.

But we’re not done yet. As of this writing, we have 1.4a27 available for you to try out. It features an even more simplified activation model allowing for more code cleanup under the covers. I also predict there will be an a28 including the fixes from this weekend real soon now. Keep an eye on http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug for updates.

So, thanks again for helping out. Special props to jcm, tmyoung and jhillacre for their hard work. And a special thank you to aakashd and the rest of Moz QA for their assistance in making this happen.

Update: For now, I recommend users stick with 1.4a25.

Our goal is to test through some basic features through litmus.mozilla.org (TBD), run Jan Odvarko’s test suite and/or a couple of online tutorials. The purpose of these tests is going to be to determine Firebug compatibility with Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.5b4.

Issues discovered will be logged on the Firebug issues tracker.

See the write-up on QMO on their events page. We’re hoping for a good turn out, so I hope to see you there.

While I’m on the subject, we’ve gone through a number of attempts to repair qm-xserve01. The most recent and most drastic measure was a full reinstall of the OS and build tools. The machine’s still running slowly and we’re looking at getting the hardware looked at. In the meantime, please use bm-xserve07 on the firefox page. Another big thank you to Nick Thomas (cf) and John O’Duinn for donating that. I swear we’ll give it back Real Soon Now!

Last but definitely not least, Ben Hearsum has signed-on as a permanent resident and is rocking the buildbot talos stuff. He’s currently embroiled in the setup and installation of the talos linux and mac ports as well as bringing up some new Windows hardware. He’s also recently put some finishing touches on the buildbot try server which should help take some of the orangeness off of the main unittest machines. A heart-felt welcome and thank you goes out to him too.

As proof of all the awesomeness that’s going on, talos is about to begin reporting on the main Firefox tree for your amusement. Expect a few small fires along the way.

So, what am I going to do now that I have all this excellent help? Am I going to take a bunch of long vacations and begin a series of complex, time-consuming hobbies? Oh, dear me, no… I’ll be helping Bob Clary get his JavaScript testing frameworks automated under (you guessed it) buildbot. This is a long-overdue task that’s been taunting me from my to-do list since I started here.

Ted M. noted that 3 of the four failing reftests appear to be kerning differences. The fourth, “(actually the first in the list) looks like it’s off by one pixel in size or so”.

The mochitests and chrome tests I haven’t looked at closely, but they appear to be a mixture of timeout, textarea and focus bugs.

If you want to take a look, grep the full log for instances of ERROR FAIL. Your help in getting qm-centos5-01 to turn green will be greatly-appreciated.

Also, an apology to Paul Reed: Apparently twm is the fallback window manager after all other options have been exhausted. I deleted the standard build user and was left with a partially-configured user. With his help I was able to turn on gdm. IOU five bucks, Paul!

Don’t fear him. He’s here to help.

This adds an extra bit of width to the Firefox tinderbox tree. Over the next week or so, I’m going to monitor qm-centos5-01′s progress and eventually, we’ll probably pull qm-rhel02 from the page, putting it to work elsewhere.

Also, props to Paul Reed for choosing the coolest window manager 1993 had to offer!

There has been an awful lot of orange on the Windows 2003 and OS X unit test boxes lately. Mostly due to shut-down errors. If you see one of these boxes turn orange after a checkin, but no obvious failures in the suites (pass/fail/todo in mochitest and reftest), it’s likely because of one of these exit failures which you can see at the end of the log.

On Windows 2003, the failure looks like,

FAIL Exited with code 1280 during test run

It turns out that Error code 1280 is specific to Windows 2003 and happens when a thread is converted to a fiber one too many times. To help track down the cause of the error, I’m working with Ted Mielc… Ted Milcza… Milk… luser on IRC and setting up an Airbreak/Breakpad/crash reporter processor to try and capture and debug this error. Expect some downtime on qm-win2k3-01 while I’m setting this up.

PS, Apologies to the always-charming Ted Mielczarek whose name I had to look up for proper spelling.

PPS, kudos to jwatt for landing a set of SVG tests into the reftest suite this morning!

But what does this mean to you, Dear Developer? I’m glad you asked. The new machine is now cycling Windows builds and test runs in about 20 minutes — approximately 3 times faster than its Windows XP VM counterpart, WINNT 5.1 qm-winxp01 dep unit test. We’ll leave them both running for awhile before eventually moving qm-winxp01 to lighter duty elsewhere.

Also, the build environment on qm-win2k3-01 (can I just call it Robby?) is updated with the latest version of mozilla-build and contains Zero Cygwin. This should keep this machine more compatible with future changes to the build system on Windows and cut down on excess kruft.

I’ll try to keep the other machines running as much as possible during the update, but there may be a few hiccups. I’ll be monitoring #developers on irc.mozilla.org just in case something goes Horribly Horribly Wrong.

I saw this note on Schrep’s blog this afternoon and remembered, that last week was actually kind of a milestone for me. With dbaron‘s help. I made my way onto a 4-digit bug – the venerable #3247 – counters in css-generated content.

David Baron wrote the original tests (which you can see at http://dbaron.org/css2.1/tests/imported-20050702/ if you’re so-inclined). I wrote a little python to convert the tests into something that could be run with reftest a few months ago. I was looking for something to use with it and they seemed like a worthy candidate.

Fast-forward to last week, and TimR asked me about those tests I’d converted. So, I dug ‘em out, popped them on my people account and forwarded a note to David. After some cleanup (there were a couple of errors in there that my conversion conveniently included for us), they are now living happily at in http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/layout/reftests/counters/. You can see their results running on every checkin on the Firefox Tinderbox page.

PS, kudos to Kray2, Nickolay, Callek and others for the “Creating Reftest-based unit tests” page on MDC.

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