It's been a while since we in RelEng started thinking about offloading builds and tests to AWS VMs. Last year we started building Firefox (Linux and Android), Thunderbird and Firefox OS on CentOS 6.2 based AWS VMs. Since then our wait times have been always above 95%, usually around 99%.

However, the story of tests' wait times is different. Since RelEng started building faster, added new products (especially Firefox OS) and more branches, the wait times went below 50%.

It took more than a month to get new platform up and running, properly pupptized and documented. I really liked using mind maps to organize chaotic thoughts, git-buildpackage to keep package building process under control and Upstart for its ability to chain services on system boot.

Chris posted a great overview of what we have now.

I would also like to say THANKS to Armen and Joel for their help with getting tests running on the new platforms, Callek and Dustin for their patience reviewing HUGE patches to get the platform puppetized.

I've been using Wordpress as a blog engine for a while now, but I wasn't happy with it for some reasons:

• Security. I've never been hit this issue, but some of my friends and colleagues had bad experience with recovering their blogs after sucessfull attacks.
• It's not easy to sanely backup it. Since Wordpress is a database driven blog engine you have to dump the database, copy the files, etc. Using version control is almost impossible in this scenario.
• No way to use it offline. That's the time when you want to write something! Of course you can write down things using your favourite text editor, then transfer the text and fix its appearance, but you can't see and use the whole blog.

Since I've been running Wordpress on my own server, I won't complain about other concerns people usually have: PHP, PHP versions, PHP modules, database, file permissions, running not under www-data user, etc.

I've been looking for something that eliminates most of the problems I listed above (the security issue can't be ever eliminated!). Since Python is the most used language at Mozilla RelEng, I've decided to pick up one of the static blog engines/generators listed at Python blog software. Nikola was one of the engines that I had been seeing in the news recently. Also having a blog engine named after your grand father isn't a bad idea. :)

So far I managed to import my old post from Wordpress. However, I'm going to reimport the old post manually, just to be sure that I have all my post in the same format. BTW, Nikola suports reStructuredText and Markdown what is really great.

I still need to figure out what would be the easiest way to put the blog under version control, teach VIM and myself to properly use Nikola.

P.S. I can hilight :)

hello.py

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys


def hello(name='world'):
    print "hello", name

if __name__ == "__main__":
    hello(*sys.argv[1:])

It took a while to start working on Bug 563317 (Install Visual C++ 2010 on build slaves) and get it working properly.

The first challenge was the OPSI installation procedure of Visual Studio 2010 which requires 3 reboots (!) to get installed properly. The final OPSI installation instructions don't seem too horrible.

The second challenge was awaiting me after I deployed the package on the try build slaves. Our start-buildbot.bati batch file was setting Visual Studio 2005 environment variables and it was not easy to reset those variables easily. After a bunch of try pushes the solution was pushed!

So, if you want to compile Firefox with Visual Studio 2010 using try server, add the following line to the end of your mozconfig:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfigs/win32/vs2010-mozconfig

P.S. To have talos tests for debug builds running properly we still need to fix Bug 701700 and deploy VC++ 2010 debug CRT on talos slaves.

Yesterday after the downtime we enabled 64 bit builds for MacOS X and Linux platforms. Partial updates will be available after the second build. Enabling new platforms went very smooth, kudos go to coop.

You can also download your shiny localized 64 bit builds.

Happy testing!

This month was a very interesting one.

I had a chance to be involved into 6 (!) release processes: 3.7a1, 4.0b1 (2 builds), 3.6.6, 3.6.7 and 3.5.11. All of these builds were unique (at least for me).

Don't want to bother, first of all, myself, then you, dear reader, with a long boring first message.

Greetings!