Friday, July 2, 2010

Disposable Project Branches - aka Twigs

Hey Firefox Developers - Want a place that's kind of like Tryserver but all yours for a short period of time?  Release Engineering now has 3 'disposable' branches set up in our build automation that you can use for testing a mozilla-central clone or a clone of your own m-c-based repo.  I call them Twigs because they are for temporary, small projects.

The Twigs (maple, cedar, and birch) each have their own tinderbox pages, run the full suite of unittests, and give you talos results by default.  Like Tryserver, they also allow you to override the mozconfig with a custom mozconfig so that you could kill off platforms you are not interested in results for.  Doing so will give you a cleaner tree and will allow our build and test resources to be used where they are most needed.

To use a branch simply grab a twig from the bookings page, file an IT bug to have your repo cloned over to your selected twig repo and then start pushing to the twig's repo to see your builds start.  At the moment one small glitch is that the first push doesn't get you any builds (bug 562026) - so you need to push twice on a fresh repo clone and the second set will get picked up by the hg poller.

I look forward to hearing if this setup helps you out.