Mozilla

tl;dr Development Phabricator instance is up at https://mozphab.dev.mozaws.net/, authenticated via bugzilla-dev.allizom.org. Development, read-only UI for Lando (the new automatic-landing service) has been deployed. Work is proceeding on matching viewing restrictions on Phabricator revisions (review requests) to associated confidential bugs. Work is proceeding on the internals of Lando to land Phabricator revisions to the autoland Mercurial branch. Pre-release of Phabricator, without Lando, targeted for mid-August. General release of Phabricator and Lando targeted for late September or early October....

As with MozReview, Conduit is being designed to operate on changesets. Since the end result of work on a codebase is a changeset, it makes sense to start the process with one, so all the necessary metadata (author, message, repository, etc.) are provided from the beginning. You can always get a plain diff from a changeset, but you can’t get a changeset from a plain diff. Similarly, we’re keeping the concept of a logical series of changesets....

For background on Conduit, please see the previous post and the Intent to Implement. Autoland We kicked off Conduit work in January starting with the new Autoland service. Right now, much of the Autoland functionality is located in the MozReview Review Board extension: the permissions model, the rewriting of commit messages to reflect the reviewers, and the user interface. The only part that is currently logically separate is the “transplant service”, which actually takes commits from one repo (e....

In 2017, Engineering Productivity is starting on a new project that we’re calling “Conduit”, which will improve the automation around submitting, testing, reviewing, and landing commits. In many ways, Conduit is an evolution and course correction of the work on MozReview we’ve done in the last couple years. Before I get into what Conduit is exactly, I want to first clarify that the MozReview team has not really been working on a review tool per se, aside from some customizations requested by users (line support for inline diff comments)....

Stuff that landed in 2016 Here’s a sampling of improvements to BMO that were launched in 2016. Improvements to bug-modal We’ve continued to refine the modal bug view, aka the “experimental UI”. The BMO team fixed 39 bugs relating to the new interface in 2016. We’ve got a couple more blockers before we make the modal view the default, which should happen in the middle of January. We know there are a still a few outstanding bugs and some missing functionality, so we will leave the standard view available for a little while, at least until all the blockers of bug 1273046 are resolved....

In Q3 the MozReview team started to focus on tackling various usability issues. We started off with a targetted effort on the “Finish Review” dialog, which was not only visually unappealing but difficult to use. The talented David Walsh compressed the nearly full-screen dialog into a dropdown expanded from the draft banner, and he changed button names to clarify their purpose. We have some ideas for further improvements as well....

For historical reasons (or “hysterical raisins” as gps says) that elude me, the BMO database has been in (ughhh) Pacific Time since it was first created. This caused some weirdness on every daylight savings time switch (particularly in the fall when 2:00-3:00 am technically occurs twice), but not enough to justify the work in fixing it (it’s been this way for close to two decades, so that means lots of implicit assumptions in the code)....

A great post on code review is making its rounds. It’s started some discussion amongst Mozillians, and it got me thinking about how MozReview helps with the author’s points. It’s particularly interesting because apparently Twitter uses Review Board for code reviews, which is a core element of the whole MozReview system. The author notes that it’s very important for reviewers to know what reviews are waiting on them, but also that Review Board itself doesn’t do a good job of this....

It’s been a whole year since my last BMO update, partly because I’ve been busy with MozReview (and blogging a lot about it), and partly because the BMO team got distracted from our goals by a few sudden priority changes, which I’ll get to later in this post. Plans from 2014 Even with some large interruptions, we fully achieved three of our five goals for the year and made good progress on a fourth....

A few weeks ago, mdoglio found an article from six years ago comparing Review Board and Splinter in the context of GNOME engineering. This was a fascinating read because, without having read this article in advance, the MozReview team ended implementing almost everything the author talked about. Firstly, I admit the comparison isn’t quite fair when you replace bugzilla.gnome.org with bugzilla.mozilla.org. GNOME doesn’t use attachment flags, which BMO relies heavily on....