What's New with Balrog - September 14th, 2016

The pace of Balrog development has been increasing since the beginning of 2016. We're now at a point where we push new code to production nearly every week, and I'd like to start highlighting all the great work that's being done. The past week was particularly busy, so let's get into it!

The most exciting thing to me is Meet Mangukiya's work on adding support for substituting some runtime information when showing deprecation notices. This is Meet's first contribution to Balrog, and he's done a great job! This work will allow us to send users to better pages when we've deprecated support for their platform or OS.

Njira has continued to chip away at some UI papercuts, fixing some display issues with history pages, addressing some bad word wrapping on some pages, and reworking some dialogs to make better use of space and minimize scrolling.

A few weeks ago Johan suggested that it might be time to get rid of the submodule we use for UI and integrate it with the primary repository. This week he's done so, and it's already improved the workflow for developers.

For my part, I got the final parts to my Scheduled Changes work landed - a project that has been in the works since January. With it, we can pre-schedule changes to Rules, which will help minimize the potential for human error when we ship, and make it unnecessary for RelEng to be around just to hit a button. I also fixed a regression (that I introduced) that made it impossible to grant full admin access, oops!

I also want to give a big thank you to Benson Wong for his help and expertise in getting the Balrog Agent deployed - it was a key piece in the Scheduled Changes work, and went pretty smoothly!