My apologies for a somewhat reduced set of highlights this week. I only returned from vacation on Wednesday, and am still trying to get back up-to-speed with what’s going on.

Thanks to Kim for taking care of these releng highlights while I was away. In case you missed them, those posts can be found on her blog:

• RelEng & RelOps Weekly highlights - March 4, 2016
• RelEng & RelOps Weekly highlights - February 26, 2016

Improve CI Pipeline:

With lots of hard work from numerous people, we have expanded the scope of TaskCluster linux builds to include all twig branches as well as Aurora, and are on-track to make these builds Tier-1, and move Buildbot builds to Tier 2, in the next week or two.

Rok is extending the clobberer tool to be able to purge the cache for taskcluster workers (https://bugzil.la/1174263). This should be landing soon.

Aki added buildtime-generated code to the python taskcluster client, for easier code inspection and better stack traces. The code is still pending merge.

Improve Release Pipeline:

Firefox 46.0b1 is the first release we’ve attempted using build promotion, a new release process that multiple team members have been working on since last year. As is typical with new systems, we encountered some issues on this first attempt, and have so far iterated 9 times trying to get it right as continue to fix bugs. Among the issues we found this week was a discrepancy between how our manual update checks were attempting to invoke Ba'al, the Soul-eater, when compared with our automated tests. This is how the sausage is made, people.

Release:

We released Firefox and Fennec 45.0, as well as Fennec 46.0b1. As mentioned, Firefox 46.0b1 was still in progress as we went to press.

We’re actually not that sad about it.

Operational:

Kim disabled the last of the Android 4.0 jobs running on pandas (rack-mounted Android reference cards). We are in the process of cleaning up the code that was associated with them, as well as decommissioning the remaining pandas and associated hardware. Thank you pandas for service, enjoy your well-deserved retirement! Android performance tests will now run via autophone and results displayed via perfherder thanks to the hard work of many people on the developer productivity team.

The “TaskCluster login v3” effort is drawing to a close, and everyone can now login and create their own TaskCluster clients for whatever mad-science automation they want to do. This change makes the TaskCluster authentication system more maintainable and scalable, and will help us in encouraging other services such as RelengAPI, treeherder, and ship-it to use TaskCluster authentication. Dustin is in touch with owners of the old “permacreds” issued to interested people over the last few years to switch over to the new system.

Two platform support discussions that I want to highlight this week:

• bsmedberg announced our intention to deprecate support for versions of OS X older than 10.9 in the Firefox 46 release cycle. This discussion is happening in the firefox-dev newsgroup.
• Now that b2g is no longer in the testing picture, Kim renewed the discussion about disabling all linux32 testing. This decision will have support implications, not the least of which are:
  • Should we continue to release on a platform without testing? (probably not)
  • Do we have sufficient 32-bit architecture coverage on Windows?

See you next week!

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