AUS for Calendar project

In Mid-may of 2007,  Stefan Sitter initiated a discussion among Mozilla build and release, the IT team, and the Calendar community about setting up a dedicated auto-update system on a community server for their project.  Sunbird was using the aus2.mozilla.org server for nightly updates, but releases are a different story.  The issue surfaced in Bugzilla and we decided to use some of the dedicated community server for an AUS setup for Sunbird.  The detail of the decision can be found in bug 381420 in Bugzilla.  The old process was creating a pretty big bottleneck for the calendar project’s release process.  With this new setup, they should not have to post any snippets for release, as the old process required.

Reflecting about this project, I was pretty pleased how it finally came about, in large part because it was a team effort where everyone contributed.  I have to admit, I really took a back seat.  The bug was initiated by Stefan and others quickly contributed.  Two special Mozilla Corp shout-outs:  one to Paul Reed, former Build and Release engineer, and the other to Matt Zeier on the Mozilla IT department.  They really followed this bug to close and made sure Mozilla provided help when and where it could.

If there was room for improvement, I guess we could have moved a bit more quickly on this.   The bug was initially filed on May 21, 2007 and we didn’t close it out until November 12, 2007.  But, it’s also fair to say that this was a completely distributed decision making process with a good number of people involved.  The problem was presented and a few proposed solutions were suggested.  (See Preed’s Comment 4 as one example.)  I came into the fold because I was able to provide some resources in the way of server space.  With the community server in Amsterdam, I knew we had some resources we could allocate, so we got approval to do this and moved forward.  The discussion progressed back and forth and finally came to a close once we were able to get an SSL cert for the Calendar project to use.

What I’d like to hear specifically from the Calendar team is how this new setup helps them going forward. We’ve also been talking about setting this up for other community projects (See KaiRo’s comment #18).  Let’s see how this goes and then explore other projects.

Thanks to everyone involved.  Always feels good to see an idea get proposed and then executed.