rhelmer’s blog

As promised, I have published a more AJAXy example of the classic Tinderbox waterfall, built using the new Tinderbox JSON output mode:

http://people.mozilla.org/~rhelmer/mockups/tinderbox/ajax.html

This version uses gzip encoding for the JSON data, only reloads the page when new data is available, and I’ve cleaned up the code quite a bit (split into separate functions for easier profiling, using innerHTML instead of document.write(), etc.).

I’m hoping to use this as a base to start making more fundamental improvements to the waterfall UI. Jesse suggests having the column headers always at the top as you scroll, which sounds pretty awesome to me. luser’s test page now shows the percentage change from the last run for performance numbers, which I will merge into my version soon.

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We took a big step towards truly hands-off releases by doing a (very early) Firefox 2.0.0.7 RC1 with the Buildbot-enabled release automation system. There are still some kinks to work out, but overall things are looking great.

The elapsed machine time from “code freeze” to “ready to ship” was ~15 hours, actual time was +12h or so waiting for someone to do the signing. This does not include time for QA, but a lot of that can be interleaved, and hopefully further automated for maintenance releases (as they generally include no new features).

I know that we’re already very good (10FD ftw), but I know we can do better. Imagine with me, if you will, that we had a timeline like this:

Day 1 – security exploit announced

Day 2- RC available

Day 3 – fix available on auto-update

Are there any other software vendors that ship security fixes to a locally-installed application on such a compressed schedule? I’d really like to know; please leave me a comment or email me privately if it’s sensitive. I’d love to be able to measure how we’re doing, and that’s tough without knowing how others measure this.

On a more general note, I think that release automation software should become a commodity just as web servers, continuous integration systems, etc. have. If you want to help out or just see what we’re doing, check out the Mozilla release automation docs.

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