Bootstrap, Buildbot & Release Automation
November 20th, 2007 by bhearsum
I am officially a QA Engineer but I still help out in Build from time to time. Most recently, I have been working on getting trunk releases automated with our release framework and Buildbot. Rob, Paul, and John both spent considerable time getting automation going for Fx2 and Tb2 releases. With that up and running it has saved a significant amount of human time on recent Firefox and Thunderbird point releases. I have been tasked with getting the same system up and running for trunk releases. Right now, that specifically means Fx3 betas. With tons of support from co-workers work on this is progressing nicely (thank you Nick, Rob, John, Paul, and Coop!).
For those interested, my work is being tracked in bug 379278.
For now, alphas and betas are being done by hand but by the time Firefox 3 Beta 2 is up for release I hope (and intend) to be able to have the automation do some or all of the process.
You linked me to nowhere :P
It’s great to have you working on this, welcome!
Thanks for the shout out, Ben.
I’ve been remiss in reading planet.m.o, so I didn’t catch this until now.
It’s interesting to see how history gets a bit distorted though.
If you look at LOC counts in mozilla/tools/release, rhelmer and I, by far, did most of the work getting the 1.8-branch automation going; joduinn more or less did the buildbot master configs (which merely call the Bootstrap automation steps in the correct order; an important component to be sure), but most of the automating of the process was rhelmer and I.
(And, for the sake of historical accuracy, I was on the hook for implementing that in bug 375788, until joduinn ordered–and I use the term very deliberately, because it wasn’t presented as an option, and I discussed it with him at some length until he shut the discussion down–me to reassign all of the automation bugs to him (not the Build pool, him personally).
(I think what’s especially interesting is when we were interviewing joduinn, he went on and on about how he wasn’t planning on coming in and taking credit for the automation work that had been going on for 6+ months before he got here. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…”)
Anyway, just a minor correction, in the interest of openness and accuracy, which Mozilla Corporation drones on about being so interested in.
Preed: Apologies for that, my head was in Buildbot land when I wrote this post. I’ll correct that.