On January 8, 2008 between the hours of 5am and 8am PST the Firefox and l10n Tinderboxes will be down.

The Win32 build machines for these tinderboxes are set to be upgraded to the most recent version. Details are in Bug 402848.If there's any reason we can't go ahead with this tomorrow morning, please e-mail build@mozilla.org.

Hot on the heels of MozillaBuild 1.2, RC1 of the Build Team's Linux Reference Platform is available in the form of a VMware Image. It should work (read: has been tested with) VMware Workstation 6, Fusion, and Player. With this image you should be able to boot it up and download/compile Mozilla without any further configuration.

This image is what most of our Linux Trunk/1.9 Tinderboxen run on. It is essentially the "Linux CentOS 5.0" platform + "Buildbot Linux" platform. (Those pages are messy currently, and should be cleaned up soon.) Default usernames and passwords can be found here.

You can download the image from here (warning! 1.1GB). Please file any bugs in mozilla.org :: Build & Release and cc me (:bhearsum).

Thanks to Preed for originally creating the reference platform.

Yes, MozillaBuild finally has a home that isn't in the form of blog posts or bugs. The page is a bit barren right now, but it does contain links to release notes, which some people have asked for.

You can watch this page for future news and updates about MozillaBuild.

UPDATE: A link to the wiki page, behold: http://wiki.mozilla.org/MozillaBuild (thanks reed)

Thanks to everyone that helped test MozillaBuild 1.2rc1. A bug with cvs was found that makes cvs checkouts, checkins, and maybe other things fail in weird ways. RC1 was the first MozillaBuild to use cvs 1.11.22, for rc2 we've switched back to just plain 1.11. We've also added a couple of small enhancements. Notably, the font issue with ClearType/widescreens has been fixed. For a more complete list of what's in rc2 checkout the dependent bugs in bug 406085.

I should note that you must run start-msys*.bat "as administrator" on Vista.

Hopefully this next part will be unnecessary but if you do find any bugs please file them in mozilla.org:MozillaBuild.

While working on release automation it was discovered that the ssh version that ships with MozillaBuild 1.1 is archaic. This has bitten us in a few places (try server, stage migration, for example).. I managed to upgrade SSH on MozillaBuild 1.1 without too much trouble and ended up putting together a MozillaBuild patch for it.

Ted asked me to setup a MozillaBuild build environment. "How hard could that be", I thought to myself. I ended up spending 3 days getting a VM/build environment setup (someone should really make some sort of installer that sets up an MSYS build environment for you...MSYSBuild, maybe? ;-). Ted and I both spent additional time fighting with DLL rebasing. (I have to admit though, I don't understand DLL rebasing at all, even after it was explained to me.

Ted eventually found a solution for this, and now, there is a MozillaBuild 1.2rc1. Anybody who can help us test will be greatly rewarded (with a new MozillaBuild sometime soon ;)!

Johnath has gone to the trouble to make the try server look much nicer. I've been hoping someone would do this for awhile. It's now got a nice favicon, sensible title, and better layout. Check it out here (ldap required).

As others have mentioned I am taking part in No Shaving In December. Those who see me regularly will note that I often go through a similar ritual at random times -- I'm glad to have a real reason to be scruffy for once ;-).

I am officially a QA Engineer but I still help out in Build from time to time. Most recently, I have been working on getting trunk releases automated with our release framework and Buildbot. Rob, Paul, and John both spent considerable time getting automation going for Fx2 and Tb2 releases. With that up and running it has saved a significant amount of human time on recent Firefox and Thunderbird point releases. I have been tasked with getting the same system up and running for trunk releases. Right now, that specifically means Fx3 betas. With tons of support from co-workers work on this is progressing nicely (thank you Nick, Rob, John, Paul, and Coop!).

For those interested, my work is being tracked in bug 379278.

For now, alphas and betas are being done by hand but by the time Firefox 3 Beta 2 is up for release I hope (and intend) to be able to have the automation do some or all of the process.

Some people reading this may know who I am but I'll give a brief introduction for those who don't.

Hi! I'm Ben! I got involved with Mozilla through Seneca College about a year and a half ago. I work on QA and Build tools, mostly relating to Buildbot. Most notably, I worked on the Try Server and more recently, Talos automation. I also help babysit many of the QA machines on Tinderbox.

I've attempted to keep up a blog in the past, and failed at it. Now that I'm working on Mozilla full-time I hope that I'll have more to say (and perhaps a larger audience ;). Expect posts about Buildbot, Talos, Tinderbox, Seneca College, and surely some other topics in the future.