The roads I take...
KaiRo's weBlog
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
February 8th, 2010
Weekly Status Report, W05/2010
Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 05/2010 (February 1 - 7, 2010):
I may not have posted a lot of Mozilla-related blog posts this week, but I got around to do quite some actual work. I wondered for a bit if I should post separately about the progress window work, but the ignorance of hard work I have been and am putting into those tiny windows as well as the vitriol from people who can't stand designs being modernized made me decide not to mention this work much. I know that it needed my work to even have progress windows at all in SeaMonkey 2.0 and I'm convinced that my current proposals and work can fix some of the shortcomings I had already know when doing the initial work and that were criticized by users, but a number of those users seem convinced that our team (especially myself) is not caring about what they say at all, so I don't feel like taking their dreams away. And the attempt of humor in the title of my post about the initial work was not well-received as well. In any case, I feel an obligation to improve work I started, but discussions with those users have taken any fun out of working on this part of the code. Maybe my rare tries of actually doing some coding should stay that rare or even stop completely. It's not like I wouldnj't have enough other work on my TODO list.
- Releases:
I prepared SeaMonkey 2.0.3 builds, which are now available on FTP as well as the beta update channel for testing by our community, offering well over 100 bug fixes. If things go well, we should be able to release this update in sync with Firefox 3.5.8 on February 16th.
The 2.0.x nightlies now carry a 2.0.4pre version number, but we have no firm schedule for the following updates yet (will coordinate with Firefox, possibly also Thunderbird drivers on that).
Work on 2.0.3 also included putting up a first version of the release notes.
I also tried to let the release process generate 64bit builds for Linux this time, those are fully experimental and will only appear as "contributed" builds though, they have no official status at all. - Build Infrastructure:
The move of our core buildbot master code to a shared location could be completed, Thunderbird will look into using the same code in the future and we closely mirror the Firefox setup now, making it easier for people patching their side to fix ours as well (and the other way round).
Revision reporting on packaged tests is now both generic and respecting applications that are built from different repositories as the platform (like SeaMonkey or Thunderbird).
Additionally, I continued working with Mozilla teams to get SeaMonkey data up on the graph server, which needed a firewall rule and a correction on the staging server's database, but testing looks good now and we should be able to go live on the real server soon. - Download Progress Windows:
I created screen shots of some additional proposals for improving the progress windows, requested ui-review on them to see which one wins out with our "UI tsar", and finally implemented the winning proposal in a patch, which should be very close to positive review by now. - Build System, Packaging:
After a few runs on the Mozilla Messaging try server, I could finalize the patch for merging our package manifests and also make Mac use a manifest, get reviews and check it in.
Another patch I worked on is about making branding usage fit Mozilla standards more closely, which should also ease the life of people wanting to ship suite versions with a different branding than the official "SeaMonkey" trademark designs.
Some discussions about build system variables reminded me that I should re-test and attach the papering-over patch for mailnews Qt port bustage which I've had locally for quite some time now. - SeaMonkey L10n:
Starting with SeaMonkey 2.0.3, the language packs are marked compatible with all 2.0.* versions.
Also with this release, Japanese is joining the collection of officially available localizations.
This was also the first time I played with and used the new L10n sign-off dashboard for a release - further opt-ins / sign-offs for SeaMonkey 2.0.x will all run through this tool now. See the m.d.l10n thread for more details on using this tool. - Various Discussions:
2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, KompoZer integration work, new machines, FOSDEM, places history changes, module ownership, mozilla.org planning and "Mozilla" vs. "Firefox" websites, EOL for Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" on 1.9.3, langpacks and switching, etc.
I may not have posted a lot of Mozilla-related blog posts this week, but I got around to do quite some actual work. I wondered for a bit if I should post separately about the progress window work, but the ignorance of hard work I have been and am putting into those tiny windows as well as the vitriol from people who can't stand designs being modernized made me decide not to mention this work much. I know that it needed my work to even have progress windows at all in SeaMonkey 2.0 and I'm convinced that my current proposals and work can fix some of the shortcomings I had already know when doing the initial work and that were criticized by users, but a number of those users seem convinced that our team (especially myself) is not caring about what they say at all, so I don't feel like taking their dreams away. And the attempt of humor in the title of my post about the initial work was not well-received as well. In any case, I feel an obligation to improve work I started, but discussions with those users have taken any fun out of working on this part of the code. Maybe my rare tries of actually doing some coding should stay that rare or even stop completely. It's not like I wouldnj't have enough other work on my TODO list.
By KaiRo, at 22:40 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | no comments | TrackBack: 0
Who Dat Sey Dey Gonna Beat Dem Saints!
I almost can't believe it - even though I really do believe in the New Orleans Saints.
When they Saints go marching in.... Too bad I can' beam over and be on Bourbon Street this night. It surely is being flooded - by cheers this time, by partying, by celebration. The "fleur de lis" made it to Football heaven!
This is a victory not only for an astonishing team, it is a victory for the whole city and people people who cherish it, restore it and rebuild it by investing their hearts in it. I've been there, and I felt what a great city it is. And I'll come back, that's a promise.
In the end, Peyton - that son of New Orleans area who has grown to be one of the greatest quarterbacks up there in Indy - could not outcoach and outcall Mr. Payton. The coach on the field needed to give in to the team he usually cheers for, a team with many great people - Payton, Bush, Porter, Vilma, and of course their own quarterback - they call him the Brees...
I'm not sure I really have fully realized that "my" Saints have actually done it and WON the Super Bowl in their first attempt ever to do so.
Who Dat!
When they Saints go marching in.... Too bad I can' beam over and be on Bourbon Street this night. It surely is being flooded - by cheers this time, by partying, by celebration. The "fleur de lis" made it to Football heaven!
This is a victory not only for an astonishing team, it is a victory for the whole city and people people who cherish it, restore it and rebuild it by investing their hearts in it. I've been there, and I felt what a great city it is. And I'll come back, that's a promise.
In the end, Peyton - that son of New Orleans area who has grown to be one of the greatest quarterbacks up there in Indy - could not outcoach and outcall Mr. Payton. The coach on the field needed to give in to the team he usually cheers for, a team with many great people - Payton, Bush, Porter, Vilma, and of course their own quarterback - they call him the Brees...
I'm not sure I really have fully realized that "my" Saints have actually done it and WON the Super Bowl in their first attempt ever to do so.
Who Dat!
By KaiRo, at 05:05 | Tags: New Orleans, NFL, Saints, Super Bowl | 4 comments | TrackBack: 0
February 3rd, 2010
A Bold New Vision To Go ... Nowhere!
Six years ago, the lowly Bush administration announced a short-sighted, uninspiring view for human space "exploration" that got titled "to the moon, mars and beyond" in NASA marketing speak later on.
But the tables have turned - the US has an inspired, bold visionary as their new president, who already earned a Nobel Prize for his great achievements in bringing around world peace once and for all. While he backed the old, short-sighted plan for some time last year, he and his administration now goes for the next step and did set up a new, bold vision that will surely inspire thousands of people and give new hope: Humanity will go nowhere!
I think that's finally a clear word and a good way, we all know that we have no business in exploring new worlds or achieve extreme things, we should stick to ourselves and boldly envision to change nothing. Even if some yesterday-minded people like Astronaut Ron Garan still believe the moon is valuable, or that the only chance for long-time survival of the human race is to make sure we can live outside of Earth, as Stephen Hawking likes to put it, those doubters will soon be gone and everyone will cheer for the strong and life-worthy future our all-beloved world leader has dared to set our directions to.
The task set up for public administration is not to boldly go where no private enterprise would, or to lead the world in science and exploration, but to trash already-started promising programs like Constellation and let others do the jobs Kennedy and Bush have wrongly envisioned for NASA. China and India surely agree as well, as they finally have a chance to overtake the US in space exploration and rip away the dreams of those lowly capitalists that still see a Captain Kirk in the future of this world - well, the interplanetary ships might come, but under a strong communist Chinese leadership, possibly backed by Russia.
Obama did come into office with a strong promise of "Change", and we surely are seeing what he was meaning all along. We don't need to go to just "to the moon, mars and beyond" - now we finally have a bold new vision to go... nowhere!
And we, as space enthusiasts and future-orientated humans, fully support NASA in fulfilling this mission.
Yes, we can.
But the tables have turned - the US has an inspired, bold visionary as their new president, who already earned a Nobel Prize for his great achievements in bringing around world peace once and for all. While he backed the old, short-sighted plan for some time last year, he and his administration now goes for the next step and did set up a new, bold vision that will surely inspire thousands of people and give new hope: Humanity will go nowhere!
I think that's finally a clear word and a good way, we all know that we have no business in exploring new worlds or achieve extreme things, we should stick to ourselves and boldly envision to change nothing. Even if some yesterday-minded people like Astronaut Ron Garan still believe the moon is valuable, or that the only chance for long-time survival of the human race is to make sure we can live outside of Earth, as Stephen Hawking likes to put it, those doubters will soon be gone and everyone will cheer for the strong and life-worthy future our all-beloved world leader has dared to set our directions to.
The task set up for public administration is not to boldly go where no private enterprise would, or to lead the world in science and exploration, but to trash already-started promising programs like Constellation and let others do the jobs Kennedy and Bush have wrongly envisioned for NASA. China and India surely agree as well, as they finally have a chance to overtake the US in space exploration and rip away the dreams of those lowly capitalists that still see a Captain Kirk in the future of this world - well, the interplanetary ships might come, but under a strong communist Chinese leadership, possibly backed by Russia.
Obama did come into office with a strong promise of "Change", and we surely are seeing what he was meaning all along. We don't need to go to just "to the moon, mars and beyond" - now we finally have a bold new vision to go... nowhere!
And we, as space enthusiasts and future-orientated humans, fully support NASA in fulfilling this mission.
Yes, we can.
By KaiRo, at 17:29 | Tags: Moon, NASA, Space, Vision | 15 comments | TrackBack: 0
February 1st, 2010
Weekly Status Report, W04/2010
Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2010 (January 25 - 31, 2010):
A good part of this week did run into various discussions and more buildbot tweaks, things are moving forward positively from all I'm seeing - we just need to get some more real development done on trunk, even though that slowly starts to pick up now. Any help to make SeaMonkey 2.1 an even better suite than 2.0 is appreciated, of course!
- Build Infrastructure:
I installed a newer gcc on the Linux machines and started using it for trunk builds. Additionally, I synched our mozconfig files for trunk much more to what Firefox is running on trunk as well.
Because I might be a bit crazy and like to put our machines under more pressure than they should be under, I even tried to turn on one additional test suite on trunk to try and find bugs to fix.
I also helped Armen from Mozilla release engineering to get his current L10n build work into a shape so that it works fine with SeaMonkey/Thunderbird builds as well.
Last not least, I filed a bug on disappearing Windows slaves - seems like we've overused the space available on our Parallels server. - Packaging:
As we want to run packaged tests on Mac some time, we will need to turn on tests on normal builds there, but need to care that the test files don't end up in file we deliver to users. That and us probably being the only ones who haven't done it yet was enough motivation for me to finally look into merging our package manifests and use one preprocessed file for all (three!) main platforms. I got all the way to having the "browser" section complete, based on the Firefox manifest and our current Linux/Windows ones, now I just need to do the sections for mail and all the other stuff we don't nearly have in common with Firefox - and then get this sucker tested and reviewed! - Support Emails:
Even if I tell people that I'm not the person to contact for support, a number of emails about that topic end up in my mailbox nevertheless, some directly, some via seamonkey-council. I tend to move them into a folder and batch-handle all of them every few weeks - or rather months. This week, it was time to do such a pass again, and I sent about 70-80 replies to them (I try to leave nobody without an answer), even though most of those are just one sentence and a templated section to look at our community page to find better and more responsive soruce for support. - Various Discussions:
2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, geolocation service options, new machines, getting codesighs and leak test data on graphs server, KompoZer integration work, L10n dashboard and sign-off, future add-ons UI, etc.
A good part of this week did run into various discussions and more buildbot tweaks, things are moving forward positively from all I'm seeing - we just need to get some more real development done on trunk, even though that slowly starts to pick up now. Any help to make SeaMonkey 2.1 an even better suite than 2.0 is appreciated, of course!
By KaiRo, at 23:16 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | no comments | TrackBack: 0
January 31st, 2010
"Everything Is A Tab" Seems Seductive!
About a year ago, in my FOSDEM 2009 talk, I presented our future vision for SeaMonkey, containing the "Everything Is A Tab" plan that should bring browser, mail, web editing, and probably even preferences into tabs that can live in the same window.
Now I read in jboriss' blog post on add-on manager that the Firefox team is thinking about putting the add-on manager in atab, and possibly also - who would have thought that - preferences!
Sounds like different people come to the same ideas, and I really hope we can move that way - esp. as this, when it is done correctly, should still allow anyone to open those things as "the only tab in a window" which should make it act and feel just like a normal standalone window and so still gets the same user experience to those people who don't want to have all those things in tabs.
(That said, I still think tabs are mostly an excuse for having a bad window manager and bad window managment widgets in the desktop environment, but having gone through some strange bugs in my on-the-edge development desktop versions, I needed to resort to tabs as well and found the grouping of related tabs in windows an actually quite interesting and seductive feature myself...)
I just wonder who will manage to get the "Everything Is A Tab" story actually implemented first - Firefox may have the advantage of a larger development team and fewer different things to host in tabs...
Now I read in jboriss' blog post on add-on manager that the Firefox team is thinking about putting the add-on manager in atab, and possibly also - who would have thought that - preferences!
Sounds like different people come to the same ideas, and I really hope we can move that way - esp. as this, when it is done correctly, should still allow anyone to open those things as "the only tab in a window" which should make it act and feel just like a normal standalone window and so still gets the same user experience to those people who don't want to have all those things in tabs.
(That said, I still think tabs are mostly an excuse for having a bad window manager and bad window managment widgets in the desktop environment, but having gone through some strange bugs in my on-the-edge development desktop versions, I needed to resort to tabs as well and found the grouping of related tabs in windows an actually quite interesting and seductive feature myself...)
I just wonder who will manage to get the "Everything Is A Tab" story actually implemented first - Firefox may have the advantage of a larger development team and fewer different things to host in tabs...
By KaiRo, at 00:16 | Tags: Mozilla, plans, SeaMonkey | 5 comments | TrackBack: 0
January 26th, 2010
No FOSDEM For Me This Year
So, I have been asked a number of times already if I will be at FOSDEM in a little less than two weeks, some even took that for granted, given that I've been there every time since we've had a Mozilla room there - and some people were shocked to hear me saying I won't be there this year.
So, to not needing to explain it in detail to everyone out there, here is why:
Unfortunately, a good friend's 30-year birthday party and the Super Bowl with the first time "my" team (New Orleans Saints) playing in that game (I somehow felt all along that it would happen this time) are the two reasons I already told publicly, but there's more behind it:
At the time when I needed to make the call if I go, I felt very tense and knew I need to get less busy and more rested while still more productive, while the conference does not serve any of that, unfortunately. While meeting all those people and discussing is surely a positive experience by itself, it usually doesn't make me more relaxed and I already felt that with the reduced amount of invitations, the SeaMonkey crowd would significantly decrease and I could get more work for us done when I'm not there.
I'm feeling better right now and can get some things done at the moment, but I still think the decision was for the best, even if it also has its downsides.
I hope there will be other possibilities to meet up with a number of Mozilla people this year (e.g. I heard rumors of another Summit and I'm sure there will be other events in Europe as well), so I hope things work out alright. And next year, I might make it to FOSDEM again as well.
So, to not needing to explain it in detail to everyone out there, here is why:
Unfortunately, a good friend's 30-year birthday party and the Super Bowl with the first time "my" team (New Orleans Saints) playing in that game (I somehow felt all along that it would happen this time) are the two reasons I already told publicly, but there's more behind it:
At the time when I needed to make the call if I go, I felt very tense and knew I need to get less busy and more rested while still more productive, while the conference does not serve any of that, unfortunately. While meeting all those people and discussing is surely a positive experience by itself, it usually doesn't make me more relaxed and I already felt that with the reduced amount of invitations, the SeaMonkey crowd would significantly decrease and I could get more work for us done when I'm not there.
I'm feeling better right now and can get some things done at the moment, but I still think the decision was for the best, even if it also has its downsides.
I hope there will be other possibilities to meet up with a number of Mozilla people this year (e.g. I heard rumors of another Summit and I'm sure there will be other events in Europe as well), so I hope things work out alright. And next year, I might make it to FOSDEM again as well.
By KaiRo, at 17:46 | Tags: FOSDEM, Mozilla | 1 comment | TrackBack: 0
January 25th, 2010
Weekly Status Report, W03/2010
Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2010 (January 18 - 24, 2010):
This has been a really productive week again and it feels good to get real things moving and also start to do work and planning for SeaMonkey 2.1 now, turning the head back and putting out fires on 2.0 was really getting tedious - even though we have a slightly conservative approach here in SeaMonkey land, we are as much about progress and innovation as the rest of the Mozilla project (even if it is in our way and sometimes means the some changes are not as much into-your-face and revolutionary as in other projects but have more of a continuity label on them).
I hope we all can get into this more again now and get some exciting patches landed for the next version of our great suite.
- Build Infrastructure:
A lot of more work on L10n nightly updates until I finally got then to work. Note that any SeaMonkey nightly updates are complete updates only, as the tooling to do partials for nightlies on our normal build machine pools is not done yet, currently waiting on Mozilla RelEng there. Getting our nightly updates to work correctly needed changes across 3-4 repositories (including mozilla-central and comm-central), but everyone was cooperative and it ended up great.
The next step I had on my mind was switching to packaged tests, both for being nearer to what Firefox run and making it possible to run test suite in parallel, esp. as mochitest-plain runs really long. To my surprise, this worked well, I needed only one small change to the generic test factory and it worked for SeaMonkey (I later coded up an improvement to report Mozilla revisions, but things worked fine without it) and tests did run fine except for a mailnews xpcshell problem, which I hope will be dealt with soon. With that, I could officially do the switch for the most part.
I also did experimentally create some hourly builders to run on a 1.9.2 tree, which we don't really want to target for SeaMonkey, but want to at least build fine. I spotted a packaging problem that was a regression form a recent build system port and Serge swiftly fixed that one - thanks for that!
And, as I now know how to deal with packaged tests and in the new architecture we should run them on normal debug and even optimized builds, I turned on the xpcshell test suite for SeaMonkey trunk Linux builds (the debug ones we do for leak testing), even if a number of failures show up there - it's the first step to fixing them. A one-cycle test run of the other suites pointed to some more issues to fix, but we don't have the machine power right now to run them all the time. - Download Progress Windows:
After some proposals have come up for fixing progress window shortcomings, we were looking for icons that were usable under our licenses, and when those failed to materialize, I went and created my own SVG icons to match the small ones we have right now, so I could produce larger versions. Having done that, I worked on patching the dialog and posted screen shots of this work in progress in the bug.
Back when I did the version of those windows that is in 2.0 right now, I did the fastest solution I could while still applying a design facelift, now for 2.1 we should have the time to improve on that and correct problems we see with this 2.0 design.
I also updated my patch for moving core build master code to a shared place. - History Expiration:
I'm risking the next flame war against me with this, but I did a patch to react to the places expiration rework done for the whole Mozilla platform, which also removes the ability to limit history to a fixed number of days or sites, but instead goes with a memory percentage. We will need to implement the cleaning up private data based on time frames to complement this to at least reduce the complaints, I think. While working on this, I saw that Thunderbird also has prefs for this around and filed a bug for them as well. - SeaMonkey L10n:
As mentioned above, L10n nightly updates for SeaMonkey trunk work now, I posted to the L10n newsgroups about this as well. - Various Discussions:
Add-on compatibility communication, new machines, comm-central policy for requiring tests, nightly.m.o, possible platform roadmap options, Firebug 1.5 release, Firefox 3.6 release, external linkage for mailnews, KompoZer and SeaMonkey, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, community-based geolocation service, etc.
This has been a really productive week again and it feels good to get real things moving and also start to do work and planning for SeaMonkey 2.1 now, turning the head back and putting out fires on 2.0 was really getting tedious - even though we have a slightly conservative approach here in SeaMonkey land, we are as much about progress and innovation as the rest of the Mozilla project (even if it is in our way and sometimes means the some changes are not as much into-your-face and revolutionary as in other projects but have more of a continuity label on them).
I hope we all can get into this more again now and get some exciting patches landed for the next version of our great suite.
By KaiRo, at 17:36 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | 3 comments | TrackBack: 0
What a Game! What a Champion! Who Dat!
I didn't tell this much around here, as I rarely talk about things here that have no connection at all to Mozilla, but here it is: I'm a huge American Football fan, and a proud member of "Who Dat Nation", i.e. a New Orleans Saints fan - the latter started a short time after Katrina, and last November, getting to know this city, it just intensified even more.
And I just watched the NFL conference championship games - while the AFC game was good, the NFC game of the Minnesota Vikings at the Saints was just awesome. I've been excited for a week about the great match-up this was to be, but the game itself was even better - always at the brink of turning around, getting fans like me shivering with excitement at the end, when it even went into overtime and had a few close calls.
Two teams playing each other that were known for great quarterbacks and great offenses - but the game showed what the regular seasons shadowed, and that is how great both defenses can actually play. Yes, I mean both. Until the last second, any team could have come out as the winner, and both played great football. The was the quality of a game that I love watching football for, and that I'd love to see at a Super Bowl - and that just might come up in two weeks.
And the great NFC champion that could come out ahead is not just a team, not just Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, Sean Payton, and a lot of other players, coaches and other staff - that champion is the whole city of New Orleans. The Saints have said a number of times that they are playing for this city, most of the players and staff are actively supporting a lot of efforts for rebuilding this city, helping with all the recovery activities, playing in the Superdome that served as an emergency shelter 4.5 years ago and winning this championship for the city on exactly the same ground. This is a sign for the whole Gulf Coast Region. Great things can happen there.
This is the first time this team earned its entry into the Super Bowl, where it will play in two weeks time - in Southern Florida, not too far from the very same Gulf of Mexico. Their opponent is another tough nut to crack. I hope it will be a spectacular and fun-to-watch game, whoever wins in the end - those games are what I love football for - even though a Saints win would be icing on the cake for sure.
Who Dat!
And I just watched the NFL conference championship games - while the AFC game was good, the NFC game of the Minnesota Vikings at the Saints was just awesome. I've been excited for a week about the great match-up this was to be, but the game itself was even better - always at the brink of turning around, getting fans like me shivering with excitement at the end, when it even went into overtime and had a few close calls.
Two teams playing each other that were known for great quarterbacks and great offenses - but the game showed what the regular seasons shadowed, and that is how great both defenses can actually play. Yes, I mean both. Until the last second, any team could have come out as the winner, and both played great football. The was the quality of a game that I love watching football for, and that I'd love to see at a Super Bowl - and that just might come up in two weeks.
And the great NFC champion that could come out ahead is not just a team, not just Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, Sean Payton, and a lot of other players, coaches and other staff - that champion is the whole city of New Orleans. The Saints have said a number of times that they are playing for this city, most of the players and staff are actively supporting a lot of efforts for rebuilding this city, helping with all the recovery activities, playing in the Superdome that served as an emergency shelter 4.5 years ago and winning this championship for the city on exactly the same ground. This is a sign for the whole Gulf Coast Region. Great things can happen there.
This is the first time this team earned its entry into the Super Bowl, where it will play in two weeks time - in Southern Florida, not too far from the very same Gulf of Mexico. Their opponent is another tough nut to crack. I hope it will be a spectacular and fun-to-watch game, whoever wins in the end - those games are what I love football for - even though a Saints win would be icing on the cake for sure.
Who Dat!
By KaiRo, at 04:53 | Tags: New Orleans, NFL, Saints, Super Bowl | no comments | TrackBack: 1
January 22nd, 2010
Running of Tests on SeaMonkey2.0 Split Up
One thing is closely following after the other, now that I have synched up even the master configuration the the SeaMonkey buildbots with what Firefox has.
First I got L10n nightlies triggering again (and in a much better way, actually), then they did even gain automated updates, and after that I started experimenting with running what we call "packaged tests".
What that means is that all files for running our test suites get packaged up and uploaded to FTP, from where any machine can pull and run them. With this configuration, we can make test suites run in parallel if idle machines are available, and therefore shorten the time until all of them are run complete. Also, they show up as distinct columns on tinderbox so one test suite failing doesn't turn the whole unit test column orange but only the one for that suite, and failures indifferent suite can more easily be tracked individually.
Our only tree running tests right now is the SeaMonkey2.0 one, and I now have turned on running tests that way there - with the exception of xpcshell tests, as mailnews tests have a remaining issue that needs to be solved first. The old "unit test" columns now only do the builds, package up those and the tests, trigger the other test runs, and then run "make check" (binary tests, cannot be packaged) and the xpcshell tests. Everything else runs in different columns.
As a future step, we might be even able to not create special builds for the test runs, but have them run on builds that are done for the other columns anyhow.
First I got L10n nightlies triggering again (and in a much better way, actually), then they did even gain automated updates, and after that I started experimenting with running what we call "packaged tests".
What that means is that all files for running our test suites get packaged up and uploaded to FTP, from where any machine can pull and run them. With this configuration, we can make test suites run in parallel if idle machines are available, and therefore shorten the time until all of them are run complete. Also, they show up as distinct columns on tinderbox so one test suite failing doesn't turn the whole unit test column orange but only the one for that suite, and failures indifferent suite can more easily be tracked individually.
Our only tree running tests right now is the SeaMonkey2.0 one, and I now have turned on running tests that way there - with the exception of xpcshell tests, as mailnews tests have a remaining issue that needs to be solved first. The old "unit test" columns now only do the builds, package up those and the tests, trigger the other test runs, and then run "make check" (binary tests, cannot be packaged) and the xpcshell tests. Everything else runs in different columns.
As a future step, we might be even able to not create special builds for the test runs, but have them run on builds that are done for the other columns anyhow.
By KaiRo, at 21:42 | Tags: Mozilla, SeaMonkey, tests | no comments | TrackBack: 1
January 21st, 2010
Automated Updates for Localized SeaMonkey Trunk Nightlies
I've been working on this for a few days now - and with some teak of last night it finally started working:
Localized nightlies for SeaMonkey "trunk" (i.e. those from latest-comm-central-trunk-l10n) now get automated updates, just like the US English ones do!
Of course, you'll only get an update if one is available, but string changes in Mozilla or SeaMonkey areas should not pose problems, our build system "merges" localizations for nightlies with the US English strings, so that you just will see untranslated strings where the localizer still has work to do.
In case ChatZilla or venkman have missing strings, we will break in the build stage and not produce nightlies or updates, though, as the "l10n-merge" process is currently unable to deal with those extensions.
I hope nightly testers will be happy and our localizations will get even more testing even before we ship alphas, betas or releases!
Localized nightlies for SeaMonkey "trunk" (i.e. those from latest-comm-central-trunk-l10n) now get automated updates, just like the US English ones do!
Of course, you'll only get an update if one is available, but string changes in Mozilla or SeaMonkey areas should not pose problems, our build system "merges" localizations for nightlies with the US English strings, so that you just will see untranslated strings where the localizer still has work to do.
In case ChatZilla or venkman have missing strings, we will break in the build stage and not produce nightlies or updates, though, as the "l10n-merge" process is currently unable to deal with those extensions.
I hope nightly testers will be happy and our localizations will get even more testing even before we ship alphas, betas or releases!
By KaiRo, at 16:03 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 1 comment | TrackBack: 2