Releng: drinkin’ wine and makin’ pies.

It’s encouraging to see more progress this week on both the build/release promotion and TaskCluster migration fronts, our two major efforts for this quarter.

Modernize infrastructure:

In a continuing effort to enable faster, more reliable, and more easily-run tests for TaskCluster components, Dustin landed support for an in-memory, credential-free mock of Azure Table Storage in the azure-entities package. Together with the fake mock support he added to taskcluster-lib-testing, this allows tests for components like taskcluster-hooks to run without network access and without the need for any credentials, substantially decreasing the barrier to external contributions.

All release promotion tasks are now signed by default. Thanks to Rail for his work here to help improve verifiability and chain-of-custody in our upcoming release process. (https://bugzil.la/1239682) Beetmover has been spotted in the wild! Jordan has been working on this new tool as part of our release promotion project. Beetmover helps move build artifacts from one place to another (generally between S3 buckets these days), but can also be extended to perform validation actions inline, e.g. checksums and anti-virus. (https://bugzil.la/1225899)

Dustin configured the “desktop-test” and “desktop-build” docker images to build automatically on push. That means that you can modify the Dockerfile under `testing/docker`, push to try, and have the try job run in the resulting image, all without pushing any images. This should enable much quicker iteration on tweaks to the docker images. Note, however, that updates to the base OS images (ubuntu1204-build and centos6-build) still require manual pushes.

Mark landed Puppet code for base windows 10 support including secrets and ssh keys management.

Improve CI pipeline:

Vlad and Amy repurposed 10 Windows XP machines as Windows 7 to improve the wait times in that test pool (https://bugzil.la/1239785) Armen and Joel have been working on porting the Gecko tests to run under TaskCluster, and have narrowed the failures down to the single digits. This puts us on-track to enable Linux debug builds and tests in TaskCluster as the canonical build/test process.

Release:

Ben finished up work on enhanced Release Blob validation in Balrog (https://bugzil.la/703040), which makes it much more difficult to enter bad data into our update server.

You may recall Mihai, our former intern who we just hired back in November. Shortly after joining the team, he jumped into the releaseduty rotation to provide much-needed extra bandwidth. The learning curve here is steep, but over the course of the Firefox 44 release cycle, he’s taken on more and more responsibility. He’s even volunteered to do releaseduty for the Firefox 45 release cycle as well. Perhaps the most impressive thing is that he’s also taken the time to update (or write) the releaseduty docs so that the next person who joins the rotation will be that much further ahead of the game. Thanks for your hard work here, Mihai!

Operational:

Hal did some cleanup work to remove unused mozharness configs and directories from the build mercurial repos. These resources have long-since moved into the main mozilla-central tree. Hopefully this will make it easier for contributors to find the canonical copy! (https://bugzil.la/1239003)

Hiring:

We’re still hiring for a full-time Build & Release Engineer, and we are still accepting applications for interns for 2016. Come join us!

Well, I don’t know about you, but all that hard work makes me hungry for pie. See you next week!

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