Hunting the Shmoo

You felt it.

With Mozilla’s migration from hg.mozilla.org to Github drawing near, the clock is ticking for developers still using Mercurial to find their new workflow.

One of the pleasures of working at Mozilla, has been learning and using the Mercurial version control system.

Taskcluster Github is the Taskcluster service responsible for kick starting tasks on Github repositories.

Introducing taskgraph --diff to help validate your task configuration changes.

Last time we looked at some ways reviewers can keep the review process moving efficiently.

In the next two posts we will examine the etiquette of using Phabricator.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Following up last week’s post on some mach try fundamentals, I figured it would be worth posting some actual concrete tips and tricks.

There is a lot of confusion around mach try.

Mozilla developers often need to juggle multiple build configurations in their day to day work.

Have you ever submitted a patch to Phabricator only to have reviewbot reveal dozens of lint errors all over?

I first joined Mozilla as an intern in 2010 for the “Tools and Automation Team” (colloquially called the “A-Team”).

If you’re working with mozilla-central on Windows and followed the official documentation, there’s a good chance the MozillaBuild shell is running in the default cmd.exe console.

This post was co-authored with Marco Castelluccio, and was originally posted to the Mozilla Hacks Blog.

Mozilla recently announced that we are planning to de-commission irc.mozilla.org in favour of a yet to be determined solution.

Mozilla uses a lot of Python.

A talk I did for the Automationeer’s Assemble series on how Mozilla handles complexity in their CI configuration.

Have you ever needed to inspect the taskgraph locally?

I’ve recently redone my website and wanted to document a few of the changes and motivations behind them.

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of try syntax, it’s a topic I’ve blogged about on several occasions before.

Imagine this scenario.

I’ve previously blogged about why I believe try syntax is an antiquated development process that should be replaced with something more modern and flexible.

One of the most painful aspects of a developer’s work cycle is trying to fix failures that show up on try, but which can’t be reproduced locally.

Mach is the Mozilla developer’s swiss army knife.

Today marks the 5 year anniversary of try syntax.

I mentioned in my previous post a mercurial extension I wrote for making bookmarks easier to manipulate.

This is a continuation of my previous post called The New Mercurial Workflow.

You may not know that most of our test harnesses are now outputting structured logs (thanks in large part to :chmanchester’s tireless work).

There’s a good chance you’ve heard something about a new review tool coming to Mozilla and how it will change everything.

tl;dr Look for reports like this in the near future!

That’s not a rhetorical question.

My last post was basically a very long winded way of saying, “we have a problem”.

Dry versus Wet As programmers, we are taught early on that code duplication is bad and should be avoided at all cost.

Getting Started tl;dr - It is possible to add more mach to your B2G repo!

Mach is an amazing tool which facilitates a large number of common user stories in the mozilla source tree.

This probably isn’t a groundbreaking revelation to most Mozillians, but it’s something I haven’t quite managed to put into words until now.

Before now running ‘classic’ unittests (mochitest, reftest, xpcshell, etc.) on B2G emulators has been a massive pain.

OUTDATED The steps in this article are no longer accurate.

qqver is a Mercurial extension that forces mq to version all patch queues in the same repository.

I came across an odd python problem the other day.

Hey!

Throughout most of our B2G test automation deployment, we’ve been very conscious about not enabling too many tests simply because we didn’t have enough capacity on our test slaves to run them all.

As B2G continues to trod onwards to its release, there is still a lot of confusion about the level and state of test coverage it has.

Contrary to popular belief, we (the A-Team) have been running mochitests, reftests, marionette tests and webapi tests on B2G in some form of continuous integration or another for about 5 months now.

This quarter I’ve been focusing on getting reftests running on B2G, triaging them and fixing various issues.

Sometimes I’d remember this awesome thing that I saw on Reddit awhile back and want to share it with someone.

Normally I don’t bother making top ten lists at the end of the year, but I was bored and figured, why not?

Mozconfigwrapper is a tool inspired by Doug Hellman’s magnificent virtualenvwrapper.

So here in Toronto another cyclist was killed today.