In December, 2008, the Community Giving Program provided five Mac Minis to the NSS community that are being used as 1) an internal build machine, 2) an internal nightly automated QA machine, 3) an NSS stable branch tinderbox, 4) an NSS trunk tinderbox, and 5) a developer test/QA machine.

Today, on behalf of the NSS community, Glen Beasley updated me with a quick report:

“We have been running full internal build/QA on two of the Mac Mini’s. These reports can be sent to external NSS users if they request to be on the list. We also have tinderboxes for 32 bit and 64 bit Mac OS X builds.”

http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/NSS/

“In the past months the Mac OS tinderbox’s have revealed a few developer build breakages and QA issues that likely would have gone unnoticed for several days/weeks had we not had the tinderbox/build machines in place.”

The first four machines benefit Mac OS X support because, in the past, we have gone weeks before finding out that a Mac OS build had been broken by a checkin.   With more solid Tier 1 build/QA support for Mac OS X, the community has been able to find breakages sooner.  Finally, the last Mini is accessible by NSS developers to address build/regression failures and develop Mac OS X specific functionality.

It should also be mentioned that anyone interested in contributing to the NSPR/NSS/JSS team should comment here and I will be sure to make the introductions to Glen and the team.

As always, if you know of any potential recipients for Community Giving program that would empower someone or a community with Mozilla, please let me know.  Though I focus mostly on Localization, this program is still thriving and we are always seeking leveraged opportunities to support recipients.

1. The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) editor community will use this Xserve to test extensions on platforms where some of them lack access.  They filed this bug, which provides more background on the need.
2. The SeaMonkey team filed a request with this bug to get more virtual machines for testing.  It took us some time to process as we decided what was best and most leveraged.
3. Finally, the server will be used as a place for the IT community (with AMO and SeaMonkey) to test virtualization of OSX.

Just today, I was at a conference and was asked what we mean by providing leveraged resources to our community.  This is a good example.  With the Xserve, we are serving many different purposes:  hundreds of thousands SeaMonkey users will benefit;  all add-on editors can now test on three platforms, which may result in quicker processing of the sandbox where new add-ons go before being listed on AMO; and, the IT community will use the Xserve to test virtualization.

Finally, if anyone is asking, I am still managing community requests, but at a slower pace for two reasons:  community requests have slowed down a bit since we launched the program a couple years back, and localization occupies most of my time so I don’t do as aggressive outreach as I did in the past.  But, we are receiving requests and I do get to them.  If you’ve contacted me about a request, we will respond.

Highlights include the following:

• Integrating with Mozilla’s code repository system, Mercurial
• Launching their offline editor Virtaal, which will allow localizers to work on translations when they are unable to access the Web
• Merging Verbatim work by clouserw and dschafer into their trunk.  (Wil wrote a very thoughtful piece about the decisions Wil and Mozilla made before choosing to hack on Pootle and how it has gone since then.)
• Migrating to Django, a new web platform for Pootle that should make developer contributions in the future a bit easier

We hope to have two projects integrated into Verbatim by the end of this quarter so localizers can use the tool to translate the UI for both AMO (addons.mozilla.org) and SUMO (support.mozilla.com).  This will happen due to the great work by Wil Clouser and the guys at Translate Toolkit.

• Les Neste will participate in the Community Loan Program.  We sent him a Mac Mini to use for the next six months so he can continue to do some great work running up to the release of Firefox 3.  After six months, we’ll reassess to see if he’d like to keep it for another few months to work on other projects, or send that Mac Mini to another contributor who might need it.  Les will be working on the following:
  1. development of the evolving Firefox user interface
  2. support Firefox 3 general theme development community by communicating changes in the Firefox UI
  3. continue to develop and maintain customized themes

• Mozilla Italia needs better web hosting as we close in on the release of Firefox 3.  The user community has been growing in Italy and we are going to pay for hosting costs to make sure that there is enough bandwidth and service available to support the upcoming release (and increased traffic due to downloads).

•  SeaMonkey Project requested 2 VMs (1 linux, 1 win32) to setup unit/mochi/crash/reftest buildbot slaves.   We partitioned a small part of the l10n server in Amsterdam, which was being woefully underused, to help out SeaMonkey.

• Narro Project created an account on the l10n server in Amsterdam to allow for collaboration on the project for those who are interested.  I blogged about this last week if you want to read more.

The good news about this last month of activity (and the past few months) is that requests are coming in unsolicited.  I’m not prodding people to try to find ways to help, which I have to admit, feels good.  Perhaps it’s also a sign that the Mozilla community thinks this program is useful and is something that should persist…not that it’s been a question as to whether or not it should cease existence.