The beginning of October means autumn in the Northern hemisphere. Animals get ready for winter as the leaves change colour, and managers across Mozilla struggle with deliverables for Q4. Maybe we should just investigate that hibernating thing instead.

Modernize infrastructure: Releng, Taskcluster, and A-team sat down a few weeks ago to hash out an updated roadmap for the buildbot-to-taskcluster migration (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CfiUQxhRMiV5aklFXkccLPzSS-siCtL00wBCCdS4-kM/edit). As you can see from the document, our nominal goal this quarter is to have 64-bit linux builds *and* tests running side-by-side with the buildbot equivalents, with a stretch goal to actually turn off the buildbot versions entirely. We’re still missing some big pieces to accomplish this, but Morgan and the Taskcluster team are tackling some key elements like hooks and coalescing schedulers over the coming weeks.

Aside from the Taskcluster, the most pressing releng concern is release promotion. Release promotion entails taking an existing set of builds that have already been created and passed QA and “promoting” them to be used as a release candidate. This represents a fundamental shift in how we deliver Firefox to end users, and as such is both very exciting and terrifying at the same time. Much of the team will be working on this in Q4 because it will greatly simplify a future transition of the release process to Taskcluster.

Improve CI pipeline: Vlad and Alin have 10.10.5 tests running on try and are working on greening up tests (https://bugzil.la/1203128)

Kim started discussion on dev.planning regarding reducing frequency of linux32 builds and tests https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.planning/wBgLRXCTlaw (Related bug: https://bugzil.la/1204920)

Windows tests take a long time, in case you hadn’t noticed. This is largely due to e10s (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis) which has effectively doubled the number of tests we need to run per-push. We’ve been able to absorb this extra testing on other platforms, but Windows 7 and Windows 8 have been particularly hard hit by the increased demand, often taking more than 24 hours to work through backlog from the try server. While e10s is a product decision and ultimately in the best interest for Firefox, we realize the current situation is terrible in terms of turnaround time for developer changes. Releng will be investigating updating our hardware pool for Windows machines in the new year. In the interim, please be considerate with your try usage, i.e. don’t test on Windows unless you really need to. If you can help fix e10s bugs so to make that the default on beta/release ASAP, that would be awesome.

Release: The big “moment-in-time” release of Firefox 42 approaches. Rail is on the hook for releaseduty for this cycle, and is overseeing beta 5 builds currently.

Operational: Kim increased size of tst-emulator64 spot pool (https://bugzil.la/1204756) so we’ll be able to enable additional Android 4.3 tests on debug once we have when SETA data for them (https://bugzil.la/1201236)

Coop (me) spent last week in Romania getting to know our Softvision contractors in person. Everyone was very hospitable and took good care of me. Alin and Vlad took full advantage of the visit to get better insight into how the various releng systems are interconnected. Hopefully this will pay off with them being able to take on more challenging bugs to advance the state of buildduty. Already they’re starting to investigate how they could help contribute to the slave loan tool. Alin and Vlad will also be joining us for Mozlando in December, so look forward to more direct interaction with them there.

See you next week!

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