• Changes to the l10n-build system

    September 30th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    John O’Duinn, Armen Gasparnian, and the rest of Mozilla’s build team should be very proud of their latest accomplishment.  I am rechanneling a bit from joduinn who will blog in more detail later.  But, this morning, they’ve made the l10n-build system capable of doing multiple repacks at one time.  John also tells me that the “nightly l10n-repacks will be generated the same way as the release bits”.

    Mostly, it means we have allocated more resources to our l10n build infrastructure with less custom setup to maintain.  We have several identical machines working together to repack l10n builds, while in the past we repacked them one build at a time in one giant pack…see where we are going here?  :)

    Ultimately, this will allow us to better service localizers with build resources.  We can do things like “one last repack” for those localizers who might have that need.  In the past, we lined up all builds in a specific order and started the process as one big batch.  If your build was in there, well, you’d have to wait until next time if something happened.  Now, we have a pool of identical machines working in unison to service the l10n-build queue, grabbing the next build to be done as fast as the machines can.  And, everything will happen much, much faster (perhaps 7x), since we have multiple machines working for us.

    For the time being, the “new builds” are in the usual nightly directory here:

    ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla1.9.0-l10n/

    If you want to view “the old way”, this URL takes you to the builds that are generated the traditional way:

    ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/old-l10n/

    If you see any problems with the new nightlies, before you file a bug, can you check to see if the same problem occurs with the nightlies that are created in the traditional way?  Functionally, these should be identical, but it will be helpful if we can see if the problem is in the new system or in both.

    This post from Armen explains more. Please read.

    John O’Duinn will post later today or tomorrow with more details.  We are going to run these two systems in parallel for one week.  If there are no complaints, we will shut down the traditional system and only use the new system.  Please send along any questions if you have them.