Wow, what a week. Between tree closures and some unexpected security releases, release engineering was stretched pretty thin. Here’s hoping for a more “normal” week next week as we try to release Firefox 40.

Modernize infrastructure: Greg Arndt deployed a fix to mozilla-taskcluster to eliminate noisy ‘deadline-exceeded’ dependant tasks whose parent tasks fail. This improves sheriffing and is part of the work to make TaskCluster and TreeHerder the best of pals.

Jake Watkins implemented timezone and w32time configurations via puppet and compiled ntpdate for Windows (for stepping the clock on systems where w32time has been disabled). This allows us to control time on Windows machines without need of the AD domain.

Q and Callek have managed to get one Windows 10 host connected to the Try server with buildbot. The machine has successfully run a selection of tests so far, some of which are even passing! We still have more work to do in order to green up the other tests and need to create more machines for the pool before we can open the platform up for general use.

Dustin got a Linux build running in a CentOS 6.6 docker image within TaskCluster. There are lots of things to fix, but this will produce much more compatible builds than the earlier attempts with an Ubuntu 14.04 docker image.

Improve release pipeline: Nick increased the l10n and update test chunking, shaving multiple hours off of the release process. This helped immensely as we prepared the release builds for Firefox 40.

Improve CI pipeline: Morgan tweeted about her latest work on .taskclusterrc, bringing WebMaker CI over: https://twitter.com/mrrrgn/status/628653555214192640

Hooked @Webmaker Android up to GitHub->TaskCluster for testing :) https://t.co/IDSBYBbxI2 Next stop … all the repos.

— Morgan Phillips (@mrrrgn) August 4, 2015

Release: Urgent Firefox security releases shipped on multiple branches in under 24 hours! This all happened in the shadow of next week’s milestone release of Firefox 40, and the regular parade of beta builds. Kudos to those on release duty, specifically catlee and Nick, for getting them all out the door without tripping over each other.

Operational: John Ford and Jonas Jensen debugged a frustrating problem in the TC provisioner causing it to fail unexpectedly. Many yaks were shaved. The cause was an obscure bit of logic calling a buggy library in one of our dependencies. Since deploying the fix last week, the TC provisioner has been stable.

Greg blogged about TaskCluster and try: https://twitter.com/gregarndt/status/629063925338914816

Demystifying in-tree TaskCluster scheduling http://t.co/qQpxXPYtnh

— Greg Arndt (@gregarndt) August 5, 2015

Dustin deployed a new version of relengapi that includes support for database migrations (with Alembic), improvements to Archiver, and a new (but not-yet-used) implementation of treestatus.

The buildduty contractors continue to make strides as we knock down access hurdles for them. They are now able to handle slave loans with minimal intervention from releng or IT, and can now update python packages on our internal servers when requested by developers.

See you next week!

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