This week in Mozilla RelEng – February 7th, 2014 - new format (again)!

Ben Hearsum

2014-02-07 16:00

I've heard from a few people that the bug long list of bugs I've been provided for the past few weeks is a little difficult to read. Starting with this week I'll be supplementing that with some highlights at the top that talk about some of the more important things that were worked on throughout the week.

Highlights:

Aki did some work on improving our documentation about things that need to happen on merge days. Historically, this has been a hairy process, and cleaning this up will help us complete it more quickly and without mistakes.
Armen worked on extracting data to show how much CPU is used on EC2 machines. This data is a step on the road to more efficient use of them.
Hal started work to enable the tree closure to trees that don't yet have it. Enabling that will help sheriffs minimize tree closures of large branches (eg, mozilla-inbound) by having better control over incoming load.
Catlee, Callek, Mike, Simone, and Massimo all attended TRIBE Session 1.
Nick made it possible for us to ship Firefox 27.0 to our Beta users before we ship it to the Release channel. This gives us a better opportunity to find hard to reproduce bugs such as bug 865701 before we ship.
Many people both in and outside of RelEng helped debug and fix network load issues that caused massive tree closures. Catlee wrote an in-depth blog post on this for those interested.
Rail switched many of our EC2 machines from m3.xlarge to the cheaper (but just as fast) c3.xlarge instances.
I did some experiments with smaller pools of build machines which is a start towards more intelligent build machine selection.