Recently in Build Category

A long time ago, when the Mozilla Try Server was almost brand new, we took it, applied a generous amount of duct tape to it, and called it the Thunderbird Try Server.

It worked, but barely. Since then, the Mozilla #build folks did an amazing job adding new features to theirs, fixing bugs, and making it more awesome in general. Unfortunately, the Thunderbird Try Server stayed behind, the way it was. Bugs against it were piling up, especially from folks using both try servers and noticing all the missing features compared to the Mozilla Try Server.

All this is about to change! The Mozilla Messaging Build team has worked on recreating a try server with all the new features (and codebase) that runs the Mozilla Try Server.

On Thursday, we'll be switching over to the new try server. What does this mean?

• push to try (try-comm-central)
• e-mail notification of build completion
• try builds for any comm-* branch
• packaged mozmill tests
• double the builders
• and much more...

By just doing:

$> hg push -f ssh://hg.mozilla.org/try-comm-central/

from a comm-* checkout, you'll be able to trigger try builds. It's that easy!

For more detailled instructions, you can just refer to the Mozilla Try Server documentation, just use /try-comm-central/ where it says /try/, that's the only difference. Also check the Mozilla Messaging Try Server wiki page, for documentation specifically about our try server (not updated yet)

Right now, we will only be running regular builds and mozmill runs, as the other type of builds are all waiting on the libxul work to complete before they can be made to work easily. Also, there are various features that we want to see in our try server that will not be done, but they will be tackled one by one over the upcoming weeks.

There are 2 important thing to note. The first one is that we'll be turning off the web interface for our try server that allowed for arbitrary patches to be submitted. It was a mess of code, and would simply not work right in this new push-to-try way of doing things.

I know the Mozilla #build folks are working on a new, shinier web interface to their try server, and once they do, we'll just port it over as well.

The second thing (and I suspect many will be happy about that) is that since push-to-try works via hg.mozilla.org, there is not going to be a need for a special certificate to gain access to it. Anybody who already has hg.mozilla.org access gets automatic access to our try server!

As before, you will be able to follow the status of builds on the ThunderbirdTry tinderbox tree.

For bugs specific to our try server, you can file bugs under Mozilla Messaging > Try Server

I was just recently pointed at How Markus Made the World Better Today by davida in #maildev today, and I just couldn't help myself.

Thankfully, it's a pure-javascript webapp, with no dependency on anything but itself. So, I just grabbed the html/js/css files and I had something up in no time. Of course, it didn't work at all, but that was a small detail.

A few fixups later, I had it working and taught it about the 2 Thunderbird trees, and Sunbird, while I was at it.

Originally, it used a PHP script to proxy/massage stuff back to tinderbox.mozilla.org and hg.mozilla.org, but since my PHP-foo is weak, and I didn't have the source code to actual PHP, I did without. A few httpd.conf changes later, and it was all working.

It's a really nice alternate way to look at the status of a tree. Have a look for yourself!

The original one is here: http://tests.themasta.com/tinderboxpushlog/
The Thunderbird one is here: http://build.mozillamessaging.com/tinderboxpushlog/

I've cloned Markus Stange's original mercurial repository. You can find my clone at hg.mozilla.org too.

Note: Yes, the whole code was in Mercurial to begin with, I just didn't even look for it until after I had it all working, dhu!

Blip: Thunderbird 3 Beta 1 Released
Originally uploaded by active_gozer

Thanks to Gary for having made me notice this was blog worthy.

We've recently released Thunderbird 3 Beta 1, and afterwards, I had a look at our traffic graphs for the Mozilla Messaging website during that period.

See for yourself, can you see when we released Beta 1?

I've been recently working on bug 449202: Get Thunderbird L10N builds working on comm-central. It's been mostly about using KaiRo's existing work for SeaMonkey and s/SeaMonkey/Thunderbird/g in the right places.

Ran into a few more problems, mostly my fault, and some having to do with the way the MoCo build network is setup.

Turns out it's also fairly complex to test this stuff, as the current setup relies on notifiers kicking on changes to the l10n repositories, so triggering a l10n build on purpose is a bit tricky. Instead, it was simpler to just wait for somebody to change something in one of the many l10n repositories and see what happens.

Well, I am happy to report that the first localized build of Thunderbird since the move to Mercurial has been produced and can be downloaded. It's only a single build, and for Windows, but more will follow as the normal churn in l10n repositories will trigger some more.

Then, the fun begins tonight, as the nightly builders should trigger a build of all of Thunderbird supported locales in one go. So, by tomorrow morning, we should have tons (43 locales per platform, to be precise) of new localized builds waiting for us, sweet!

Oh, and in case you had been wondering, the first successfull build is here. I think it's pretty cool that the first locale that successfully build turned out to be ga-IE, so that will explain the topic of this post. Hopefully, somebody from that locale will understand the title (and apologies if I butchered your language, feel free to correct me please)