The Release Engineering:Future bugzilla component alternately inspires feelings of sadness, loathing, and contempt…and that’s just within the RelEng team!
I’m certain most developers first response to having their bug moved to the Future queue is, “Oh, look, my bug has fallen down a well.” Historically speaking, that may not be far from the truth.
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This is a follow-up to Ben’s blog post about the RelEng Sheriff back in October. His post described clearly what the RelEng Sheriff (and more generally, the RelEng team) can do to help developers.
Since we implemented the RelEng sheriff (or “buildduty” as it is more informally called) last spring, developers have been getting better about using the buildduty person as the first point of contact for RelEng issues. I’d like to implore people to continue doing so. There are a few exceptions, of course:
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Inspired by the physical model dropped off today by our architect (and the relentless requests for photographic evidence thereafter), I posted a bunch of pictures today, both of the model and some from Christmas time as well.
On the house front, things are obviously progressing well if we’re at the model stage. Kris has a post up over at her blog about some of the green certification systems we’ve been examining and synthesizing (and by “we,” I of course mean “her”) over the past few months. In redux, we’re much more interested in a house that performs well over the long-term in terms of energy savings and being comfortable rather than one-time, “hooray-for-us” points. As such, we’re heavily invested in making design choices and choosing systems that will last.
Recognizing some existing internal group dynamics and the need for the entire Mozilla release engineering (RelEng) team to grow in a more sustainable manner, we recently started an internal reorganization of the RelEng group. John will likely blog about the new structure of the group at some point, but I’ll relate the bits that are pertinent to me.
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The Mozilla release engineering (RelEng) team has grown substantially over the past two years. Some members of the team have certain domain-specific focuses (e.g. talos, mobile), but one of our primary team goals has been to get our release automation to the point where anyone on our team can handle a release. Given the emerging branch picture for Mozilla code where we might see simultaneous releases on 3+ code branches (a.k.a release-apalooza), this is becoming increasingly important.
I’ve done my share of releases over the past few quarters, and until the current release (3.5.4, still in progress as of writing), I would have said that I understood the process pretty well.
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Why is it that I can order a heavy-ish object from a company in California with whom I have no previous business relationship and have it show up at my door in less than a week, but *renewing* a magazine subscription (despite now accepting my account details online, details which *YOU ALREADY HAVE*) still takes 6-8 weeks to process and results in missed issues? Condé Nast FAIL.
I had one of those classic web-enabled parenting moments tonight that have become so common for me these days that I sometimes fail to appreciate how much of a change it represents from how I grew up.
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I long ago came to grips with the fact that the new G.I. Joe movie was going to have precious little to do with the G.I. Joe of my youth. I still have an attic (note: not my attic) full of G.I. Joe toys, so the compulsion to see it eventually overrode common sense and generally awful meta-ratings.
I usually like MovieBob’s reviews over at the Escapist, but before actually seeing G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I just assumed he had lost the thread when he posted a positive review of the movie given the overwhelming negativity of others. Having now seen the film, I think he’s absolutely spot on.
This is the type of fun summer movie that I haven’t seen in ages: a decent plot that is coherent and doesn’t expect me to check my brain at the door, larger-than-life characters in over-the-top action sequences, and enough cool tech for 2 regular action movies. If someone had just thought to take the lips off of Snake Eyes’ costume, I dare say it would have been damn-near perfect*.
* “Perfect” in the summer movie sense. This movie won’t be winning any Oscars, let’s not kid ourselves here.
The roll-out of nightly l10n updates has been…bumpy. The primary user-visible symptom of this has been that nightly updates for en-US have sometimes been delayed by many hours when compared to when they would have been generated previously.
I hesitate to say that these consequences were unforeseen, but rather that we were initially unsure how/if the various systems we use to generate, store and serve updates would even cope when they had to deal with more than one locale.
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Poach Motel’s statistically-aberrant winning streak came to an end after 4 games on Sunday. We won our first game of the day against another tough opponent to make it to the tier finals, but we ran out of gas in the finals, losing 12-15 to new tier champion, Fresh.
Considering we weren’t even supposed to be in *this* tier, I’m not overly broken up about it. Finishing 10th overall is the best showing ever by this team or its core of players. Kudos to all involved. Can’t wait to pick it up again with most of you in a few weeks for Fall league.
