Want to help? Encouraging community contributions to Release Engineering

In a timely confluence with Mozilla's new Steward initiative, I'm preparing to get some community contributors engaged with some of the projects we work on in Release Engineering.  A fair amount of our production infrastructure has to be locked behind VPN and sekrit passwords (we have 400+ million users to protect) but there are more and more RelEng side projects. We provide tools to the larger developer community and solve interesting scalability challenges with our unique (and massive) automation systems that can be worked on by any interested person in their own local test environment and then integrated into our /build repos. My personal goal is to try and get 2 or 3 regular community contributors to come work with us on tackling these.

In order to solicit contributions I have been working with David Boswell. We added Release Engineering to the mozilla.org/contribute 'areas of interest' page and I have created the beginnings of a RelEng-specific contribution page. The first two areas that I think would be a great introduction to working with RelEng code & tools are the TryChooser and our upcoming Autoland system.  For the latter, our intern Marc Jessome is sticking around this fall as a contributor to carry on the amazing work he put into this system over the summer.  He'll be continuing to debug the code and improve the portability of it so that we can get it into a beta testing stage by the end of October.  As that work is being done we also need someone to help us write the API functionality that will allow sheriffs and developers to write tools that utilize this new hands-off landing queue.  We'd also be happy to have people work on the issues that come up when we take Autoland to the next level - auto-landing on a production branch.  To do this we'll want some automated backing out, bisection, and the ability to wait on getting patches reviewed before continuing.

Another great area for someone interested in helping out Firefox developers is working on the TryChooser syntax and features.  There is a whole tracking bug dedicated to try_enhancements and most of those bugs are ones that can be worked on in a local staging environment.  It's a chance to get your feet wet with buildbot and our custom scheduling setup. Some of these smaller bugs would be short on time commitment and high on developer appreciation if you fix them. That can be a winning combination for a new contributor, I speak from experience on that :)

So, if you're reading this post and you or someone you know is interested in dipping their toes into becoming a Mozilla contributor and these projects make you curious then come find me and we'll get you set up with a staging environment so that you can start fixing real world tools and automation bugs in no time.

Source Server Demo

So I am still waiting for the install of Windbg. The timing is kind of terrible because everyone's all a flutter with Firefox 3 and I'm twiddling my thumbs a bit. As I can't test the source server from the user end yet, I must turn my attention to documentation and also to planning my final "knock your socks off" demo. Instead of 2 demos which would be ridiculous in the short amount of time that is left, I will do one super demo where lots of people (you dear readers?) will come and test out the source indexed builds. This should happen in the week before exams, more info to come soon. If anyone is looking for contrib points (is that like karma?) please come to the demo.

Source Server 0.2 release - HOWTO and Contribution Opportunity

Here are the goals for my 0.2 release

• release build of ff with debugger-info enabled to create pdbs without being a full debug build


• using lib xul - make an installer for people to download


• take the symbols and index them and distribute the source


• set up the symbol server but indexed so that someone can pull the source code


• which involves running the cv2http.cmd on the indexed code

And the results:

How to set up the Source and Symbol Server

1. add a path to my symbolServer http://avnerd.tv/symbols/2007110200 as per MDC docs in Tools->Debugging->Symbols
   
   
   


2. check the option for turning on the source server in Tools->Debugging->General
   
   
   


3. Download the installer from here Firefox Installer **(FYI you have to use my installer because it is the one that I indexed code and uploaded symbols for - if you do not use this installer you will not get the proper results)



4. install the firefox you just downloaded (it will install as Minefield in Program Files\Minefield)



5. make sure you run it with --no-remote and -profilemanager so you don't mess up your normal Firefox experience



6. once it's running, go to Tools->attach to process... and attach VStudio to the firefox instance



7. after it's attached, you can go to Debug->break all and then poke around at the firefox functions code (You will get a warning about downloading code from an unknown source, click on "run" because you trust me)

This is what it might look like:

Contribution Opportunity

You need to be in the Windows platform and have a copy of Visual Studio to run the above instructions. If this applies to you, please take a minute to download the installer and follow the instructions as I've outlined them.

Please leave a comment answering the following questions:

1. Did it work for you?


2. Were the instructions clear?


3. Any constructive feedback?

Contrib Opportunity! Help with resolving a path with spaces and a perl script

I have a perl script called cv2http.pl that is called upon by cv2http.cmd

Both are in c:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows\sdk\srcsrv directory, which is where I am making this command line call from.

I am trying to do this:

walk.cmd c:\symbols\*.pdb cv2http.cmd HTTP_ALIAS http://avnerd.tv/source

What this will do is swap out the cvs information and replace it with a path to my server where I have the source code.

When I run it I get this:

"Can't open perl script "C:\Program": No such file or directory

for every .pdb that is found.

It looks like it is breaking on the space between Program Files in the path.

So - does anyone know how to either: make this script be forgiving of blank spaces in a path or change the directory this points to so that I can move it and try from there.

**** UPDATE *****
Turns out it was as easy as adding "" around the ~%d0\cv2http.pl call in the cs2http.cmd file - thanks to all who helped on #seneca