We in Release Engineering always love it when people take the time and effort to fix a bug, cleanup some code, or otherwise enhance our infrastructure. However, it’s often difficult to take outside patches because they are generally untested. Because of the nature of our code and systems – how tightly it’s tied to infrastructure, limited access to said infrastructure, and how many different systems a single change can touch – it’s nearly impossible for outside contributors to do more than the most basic testing. We don’t have a Try Server that can test patches to RelEng code, and proper testing requires many different machines and can be very time consuming – especially if you’ve never done it.

It’s always unfortunate to see patches sitting for days, weeks, or in rare cases, months, before they get landed. However, we don’t like to land untested patches because it can lead to unnecessary build bustage.

I want to fix this, so over the next few months I’m going to be prioritizing testing your patches every Monday. I will set aside my normal work for a day to help test and get ready to land contributed patches. High priority things such as releases or infrastructure problems will take precedence over this, but that shouldn’t be a common occurrence.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for things, but if you want to me ping directly about a bug please feel free to do so.

Consider this in an experimental state. I’ll be tweaking the process along the way and am very open to improvements here.

Bug 391364 – Tryserver should have the option of building specified platforms

Requires changes to: CGI script/UI, master.cfg/Buildbot steps

Bug 411735 – Client side form validation

Requires changes to: CGI script/UI

Bug 411735 – Support building from an alternate revision/branch/tag in a mercurial based try server build

Requires changes to: CGI script/UI, master.cfg/Buildbot steps

Bug 430942 – If bug # given, automatically add comment to bugzilla when try build finishes

Requires new Buildbot Status plugin

Bug 431375 – Try server needs to be able to handle non-Firefox builds

Requires changes to: CGI script/UI, master.cfg/Buildbot steps

Bug 431400 – Try server should support downloading bugzilla attachments as well as receiving uploaded patches

Requires changes to: CGI script/UI

I am happy to give guidance to and assist anyone who wants to work on any of these bugs. The CGI/UI can be found here: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/webtools/buildbot-try, the buildbot master.cfg is here: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/tools/buildbot-configs/tryserver/, and classes supporting it are here: http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/tools/buildbotcustom/tryserver/.